Diskover Community Edition is a free, Apache-2.0 licensed file system indexer, file search engine and storage analytics platform that crawls local, NFS/SMB and cloud storage into Elasticsearch, built for home users, system administrators and anyone who needs to understand what is consuming their disk space.

What it is

Diskover Community Edition is an open source file system indexer and search engine powered by Elasticsearch. It indexes and manages data across heterogeneous storage systems, and the documentation describes it as a data analytics and management platform rather than a single-purpose scanner. The crawler itself is written in Python and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows 10, while the accompanying web application, diskover-web, is written in PHP, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS. The Community Edition is free to use for an unlimited time and requires no license keys.

The concrete problem it addresses is unchecked growth of file data. The project's own framing is that as the volume of file data generated by businesses keeps expanding, the stress on expensive storage infrastructure, users, system administrators and IT budgets keeps growing with it. Diskover lets users identify old and unused files and gives better insight into data change, file duplication and wasted space. It replaces the manual, host-by-host inspection of file systems and the ad-hoc reporting that usually accompanies it, letting administrators search and organise files, provision storage, monitor and report on storage usage and make decisions about new infrastructure purchases from one indexed view.

Key capabilities

• Indexes and searches file systems through Elasticsearch, covering local file systems as well as NFS/SMB shares and cloud storage.
• Detects duplicate files and analyses wasted space, matching the duplicate-files, duplicatefilefinder, disk-usage and disk-space-analyzer topics.
• Supports file tagging and file management over the indexed inventory, reflected in the file-tagging, file-manager and file-indexing topics.
• Accepts plugins for adding additional metadata to indexed entries.
• Reports on storage usage and data change so administrators can see old and unused files.
• Ships a web interface, diskover-web, written in PHP, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS, alongside the Python-based crawler.
• Written in Python for the indexer, running on Linux, macOS and Windows 10.

Who uses it and how

• Home users running the Community Edition on their own machines, a use case the README calls out directly, with no license keys and no time limit.
• System administrators managing storage infrastructure, using indexed results to provision storage and plan purchases of new hardware.
• Storage and IT teams working across heterogeneous environments, crawling local file systems alongside NFS/SMB shares and cloud storage.
• Operators monitoring and reporting on storage usage and data change over time, and hunting duplicates to reclaim wasted space.
• Users who need extra metadata beyond what the crawler collects by themselves, extending the index through plugins.

Getting started

Installation is covered by the project's Install Guide (INSTALL.md) for the Community Edition, with day-to-day usage documented in the separate User Guide at docs.diskoverdata.com. Current Community Edition release is v2.3.4, released January 2026.

How it compares

No comparable third-party products are named in the facts for this entry, and no list of paid products it replaces is provided, so Diskover Community Edition stands alone in this registry. The one point of contrast the project itself draws is internal: Diskover also sells annual subscriptions aimed at corporations, which unlock additional core and industry-specific features beyond the free Community Edition.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must operate Elasticsearch, since the entire index and search layer depends on it, plus the Python crawler and the separate PHP diskover-web application; this is not a single binary dropped onto a laptop. Organisations that need the industry-specific and additional core features should look at the vendor's paid annual subscriptions rather than the Community Edition, and anyone still running the 1.X line should note that version is end of life and no longer supported. The README is sparse and defers most detail to external documentation and the project's Slack workspace, and the release cadence should be checked against the changelogs before committing to it.