Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives

[Ussuri]

I was sure this had been asked before, but I couldn't find it so could have been wrong.

I have a personal hard drive which I use to hold the engineering data I collected over the years. I used to keep it in folders but ended up with too many of them.

The problem I now have is that I have thousands of files, a mixture of formats, and other than a useful file name I struggle to find particular documents.

Can anyone recommend a tool or method that could be used to index the drive which would make finding things easier?

 

[GregLocock]

http://www.voidtools.com/

might be a place to start

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[DRWeig]

I seem to recall a Google product that indexed and provided search functions. Came pre-installed on a PC maybe three years back. I remember it being a resource hog, though -- so I uninstalled it eventually.

Windows 7 has a great search feature in the Windows Explorer accessory. It finds things by keyword and file name at the same time, and works with the common file formats (Word, PDF, XLS, etc.)

Good on ya,

Goober Dave

 

[MadMango]

I'll second Greg's suggestion of VoidTools' Search Everything. It is light weight and super fast.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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[MintJulep]

Looks like the Voidtools gadget only indexes file names, not content.

Google Desktop was quite good I thought, but has recently been killed off by Google. I'm sure a bit of searching would find the last version for install.

There is Windows Search available from MS.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=23

 

[MikeHalloran]

In Windows XP, I use Agent Ransack, which can search by title or content or both, and unlike the Windows tools, does not quietly exclude certain file types from the search.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[IRstuff]

Back in the hoary days of DOS, the 8.3 file format was clearly a sever limitation, but luckily, we didn't have that many files to futz with. Nowadays, you're only limited by the ISO standard for filename length (level 2) to 208 characters.

The Void Everything search works very well for for just filenames.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
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[imcjoek]

As an addendum, is anyone aware of a search tool that is designed to work where the files are on a shared network drive? Such that client computers can search a common filestore?

Google desktop search supposedly supports this, you can add network drives to be indexed, but I have found it to be completely unreliable in actual practice. It never realizes new files are added without a full re-index.

 

[IRstuff]

I dont' think that's possible with just a client computer, since it can only know, at best, what happens when the client is on. But, even at that, there's generally no process by which a client can find out what's happening on the network server, unless there's some sort of logging program on the server itself that the client can access.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[Ron]

I use voidtools Everything....works great.

 

[Ussuri]

Thanks folks. I will have a look into the voidtools and agent ransack.

 

[jmw]

If some of your files date back to Windows 3.1 days of 7 digit number naming, you are really in trouble.
I suppose one thing you ought to do is go through these files, open them up using the appropriate filters and save them in current formats, in new locations and with new names, and should do this any time you access a file. That means designing a file storage system and naming system all of your own.

Agent Ransack sounds good.

I must say hat this is an unpleasant thread to read.
I am concious that my hard drive is filling up and the external hard drive is a pain to use as a back up.
I have been using Easeus partion master to expand my C drive to give me more space (I don't use the d: drive for other than its original use so it has lots of unused wasted space).
I also used duplicate cleaner to rid my files of multiple copies (which doesn't rely on the file name but identifies duplicates more intelligently than that).
But still I have amassed lots of files on the hard drive and I hate to think of all those back up CDs with old Windows formats that windows won't open any more.

Some files it has been easier to find again via Google than on my own drive which has been one cause of so many duplicates.

And that is part of the trouble.
I once, mistakenly, simply bookmarked useful files found on the internet only to have a huge bookmark list and then to find far too many bookmarks were coming up with "file not found".
Plus searching for the original files again is frustrating. Google doesn't seem to search as well as it ince did or perhaps it seraches in a different manner today.

Saving the files is preferable but how should I save them? using the original file names or my own? And that leads to its own problems.

I sometimes think I was better with piles of paper copies in no particular order but which, somehow, the brain can navigate and search more efficiently (or more successfully) than going through My Documents.



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[MikeHalloran]

Agreed that Google has jumped the shark.

What with Google itself selling positions in search results, and commercial SEOs setting up webpages to fool Google's crawlers, it might take half an hour of random adjustments to your search phrase to get any relevant results.

Bookmarks are mostly ineffective because the content disappears and moves around as content authors change hosting services. I have gotten in the habit of copying interesting content when I run across it, rather than assuming it will be available later. ... which causes my local drives to fill up even faster.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[jmw]

I'm beginning to wonder if some sort of "librarian" training would be a useful addition to the skill set we all need.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[IRstuff]

Don't think it's a question of getting librarian training so much as it is discipline. In most cases, we know what we should be doing, but we avoid it. If you look at many publications, you often see indexing keywords are added to just below the abstract, just for the purposes of future cataloging. So, that's something we could already do now, but we avoid the extra work that's required.

I'm just as guilty as anyone else, and the latest generations of hard drives have compounded my inherent packratness. I used to have stacks and stacks of paper copies of articles, which I never really read, but PDFs and other file formats don't add any weight or volume to my collection (see my answer to the Internet weight topic) and I've got about 36,000 files floating around. In many instances, the papers don't have the indexing information already compiled, so it's extra work to create those.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[Ussuri]

I did wonder if there was a utility that would allow me to 'tag' each file with a searchable abstract. So everytime something new went into the drive I would give it an appropriate name and give it an abstract. This would hopefully make it easier to find stuff.

I suppose that you could put all the abstract in the file name (up to 255 characters) but I have had problems opening long file names. Plus it looks daft.

The void tools works well as long as the file name is meaningful. I have a lot that just say 'Appendix' or 'Graph'.

I think that no matter which way its done, I am going to have to put some time into it to sort out. Great...

 

[ProtectionEngineer]

Try this approach.
1. Launch DOS Command Prompt
Start/Program/Accessories/Command Prompt

2. Dir C:\Folder-Path /O:N /S /B > C:\MyFolder.txt
The Foldername and Filename will be Output to MyFolder.txt file

3. Exit Dos Command Prompt

4. Window Explorer Look for the filename MyFolder.txt

5. Open MyFolder.txt in Notepad.

6. Use Notepad /Edit/Find == Type "Search Name"

This will help you to locate the "Search Name"

This is a poor-man tools.

Alex

 

[MikeHalloran]

Keeping track of abstracts associated with a file should be an integral function of the operating system. For reasons of simplicity and reliability, the abstract should be stored within the data file.

Quite a few applications do have extended properties fields within their data files. I'm not aware of an OS function to search those fields, but it appears some groundwork has been done.

For now, you can bury an abstract anywhere in the file and use a tool that can search the entire file, like Agent Ransack. (I have no commercial interest in the tool; I just like it.)




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[zcp]

Copernic = awesome. Countless hours of engineer's time saved looking for 'that' file.

ZCP

http://www.phoenix-engineer.com

 

[jmw]

I did have something I downloaded and ran. Every so often it would re-index everything.
The trouble is, what with McAfee and various other programs running in background, Microsoft updates etc. using the PC is at times like watching windows 3.1 at work on an old slow machine with no memory to speak of.
I un-installed it.
I now rely on Windows search which does at least do a keyword search of file content.

Meanwhile, I have to find out why, even signed in a an administrator account, the PC won't let me disable things in the start menu.......

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com