I have stacks of CDs and DVDs containing everything I've done since I had nothing but Juno and a 486. I used to have a pretty usable index of this information, but for the need of a better one, and one that worked with linux, I stopped updating it. Here's what I need it to be able to do:

-Search inside of archives, including ZIP, RAR, and self-extracting EXE, and inside of archives that may be contained in these archives.
-Create thumbnails of images and movies
-Keep track of what disk number a file is on.
-Have a simple way of indexing (put in a disk, let it build)
-Index full text of just about everything, including MS Office document, OO.o documents, and LaTex documents
-Be able to index the text resources of EXE files, for example, being able to find the true name of a program who's installer has a strange file name, or being able to search the EULA or other messages within the installer.
-Be able to work under linux, especially Gentoo
-have an option to try to index files it does not recognize.
-have the abiliity to search this index filenames only or full text.

Is there a program that does all this in existence? Could anyone BE that awesome? Does anything come close? Any features I didn't know I needed?

Never did it but doesn't mysql do that? I'm not saying it does but it may be worth searching around for.

You may can do a emerge -S db and see what comes up. db being short for database. May try database too.

Just a thought.

Doing this in MySQL seems exceeding complicated. I found Beagle to be pretty intriguing, though, it almost has the features I'm looking for
http://www.beagle-project.org/Main_Page

Is anyone masterful in configuring this thing? Here's what I'd need to do that I can't find information on:
-Index inside archives (and inside archives within archives if possible)
-Index removable media (Sure I could tell it to index /mnt/cdrom, but how do I index lots of disks? Can I define different "collections" to search?)

The searching and thumbnail features seem well implemented from demos I've seen. I've searched the website and google for more information on Beagle and removable media or archives, but haven't found anything.