Daniel's professional journal and project's overview

Searching files on Windows

Working with Windows file search is hardly easy: even the responses and the quality of Windows 7 is good the file indexing is not very comfortable. I did not find out how to search in one subdirectory or how the “index” is build. Windows just traverses the whole disk or all hard drives reachable when searching. That’s the point I ask: “What use is the index service letting the disk rotate and spin on and on while I want to work?”

Mac OS does this better and finds files and folders quickly and accurately by using a local database that’s ‘ve been initialised. I made one video series off that to demonstrate searching and, before all finding, files on large data stores is possible withing very short times.

See my video one and
consecutive the second one. (Either German voice.)

I think about writing a Java app that does Mac-OS-like file handling on Windows: searching, indexing and backing up files without lifting a finger. This app should traverse the master file table (aka TOC – “table of contents”), updates it’s database. So a very fast finding in very large data stores is possible. On top of that this app should index PDFs, ODTs and other text-based formats thats compressed using Deflate or (G)Zip algorithms.

This plan is inspired by “Everything” (Voidtools) and Locate32 (Locate32) If you’re interested in co-developing this app or want to know more about my plans, know an app thats like this or it’s later availability: write an eMail to me. I would like to be contacted for that.

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