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?

 

[kacarrol]

I'm with you, I have thousands of files too and started struggling to find things. In highschool my principal refered to me as the information junkie.

I have a pretty good system of folders and naming system but still may have to open a dozen documents to find what I want. I looked for a good library software but couldn't find anything in my price range so I finally bit the bullet and made an excel spreadsheet.

It would have been better to make an Access Database but I don't always have Access available at every computer. It's a little tedious to enter all the information by hand in the spreadsheet but I love having it there when I need to find a file. This also gets around the fact that some pdf scans of old files are images and so don't have searchable text for other programs to read through. On the bright side I can convert the Excel file to and Access database in the future (or I'm pushing around the idea of writing a database in some form of internet language).

 

[bernoullies123]

Copernic

http://www.copernic.com/

is the best tool I have found.

You need to pay a few bucks for the professional edition so that you can index your server folders. Works like a charm, and you can set when it indexes (i.e. when the computer is idle). I have over 100k documents indexes containing over 2m words... You can use wild cards to improve your search results. Well worth the money.