Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
(OP)
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?
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?





RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
might be a place to start
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

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RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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:
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
The Void Everything search works very well for for just filenames.
TTFN
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RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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.
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
TTFN
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RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
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Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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...
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
ZCP
www.phoenix-engineer.com
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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).
RE: Indexing and Searching Files on Personal Drives
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.