Overview

Diskover is an open source file system indexer, search engine and data analytics platform. A Python crawler walks local file systems, NFS/SMB shares and cloud storage and pushes file metadata into Elasticsearch, while the bundled PHP/JavaScript web interface (diskover-web) lets you search, browse and chart that index. It is aimed at answering the practical questions about large storage estates: what is taking up the space, what has not been touched in years, where duplicates and wasted space hide, and how capacity is trending.

The Community Edition is free to use with no licence keys or time limits. Diskover Data sells annual subscriptions that unlock additional core and industry-specific features, but the community build is a complete, self-hosted tool.

Features

• Elasticsearch-backed index – every file, its size, owner, timestamps, type and path become searchable documents.
• Heterogeneous storage crawling – local file systems, NFS/SMB mounts, cloud storage and multiple volumes from the same instance.
• Storage analytics – directory trees by size, file-age reports, duplicate detection, wasted-space reports and capacity trending.
• File search and browse – fast full-text and field-based search across the index, with per-file drill-down from the web UI.
• Plugin hooks – custom metadata can be attached during the crawl (for example media or archive-specific attributes).
• Task control – crawls are launched, scheduled and tracked from the web interface, with per-task logging.

Deployment and Requirements

Diskover is self-hosted: a crawler host plus an Elasticsearch 8.x cluster and a web server. Documented requirements are Python 3.8+, PHP 8+, nginx and Elasticsearch 8.x. The project officially recommends RHEL 8/9 or Rocky Linux 8/9, and the crawler also runs on macOS and Windows 10; a community Docker image is published as linuxserver/diskover. The current Community Edition is the 2.3.x series (2.3.4, January 2026); the 1.x line is end-of-life.

Licence

Apache License 2.0 for the Community Edition, which can be used free of charge for an unlimited time. Commercially licensed subscription editions exist for additional features and support.

Related tools in the directory

• Prometheus – metrics collection and time-series storage for the hosts being indexed
• Grafana – dashboards over storage and capacity metrics
• Glances – single-host system and disk overview