I need a filling system!

I spent an hour earlier looking for a program I have backed up... somewhere!  I know the bloody things here, yes really it is! Honest!   But can I find it? not a chance!

Years ago when I used to shoot film (still have all my kit) I used to shoot a hell of a lot of pictures, often eight or tens rolls of film a day wasn't unusual, I still have all the negs, hundreds of thousands of the things, and somewhere is the filling system I used, a simple card index.  It worked a treat, I could find any job in a few seconds.  If I wanted my photos of a policeman swiming in full uniform, no problem, or my pics of the lorry on the railway lines, again no problems.  But with all the high tech stuff I can't find bugger all!

Now take Adobe Lightroom for example, as well as being photo editing software it's also a DAM, or digital assert managment system.  The idea is all your pics go through it and you can keyword them and search for them when you want.  Yes it does work... up to a point. Trouble is a lot of the photos I edit don't need to stay on my system.  I often edit pics for other people, and I don't want or need to keep all their pics on my hard drive forever (they are backed up mind you) so Lightrooms clever system isn't ideal for me, even my own pics don't stay on the main editing pc for long, once I'm done with them they go off to external hard drives and dvd.

A hard drive is only so big, now it's easy to shoot ten or twelve GB of pics at say a wedding if you shoot raw, and I tend to use raw pretty much all the time (although I have cut down for playing stuff) so it's pretty easy to fill up a drive if you take a lot of pics, and keep in mind you want your pics on at least two drives,. they can and do fail.  After a while this starts to get expensive, and you end up with a tons of bloody hard drives.... which is why I can't find the bloody software I'm looking for, after wading through about a dozen hard dives I gave up, I may not live long enough to find the sodding thing!