Index Your File – Fast file search program for Windows

Posted on November 21, 2008 at 5:18 am

Have you ever had to try and find a file quickly in a very large directory structure, like a network drive? Working in IT, this happens to be all the time. I’m sitting on my own computer or someone else’s computer and I suddenly need to file one file on the network server.

Too bad the network drive has thousands of folders and thousands of files, making it extremely difficult to find the file manually. Earlier, I wrote about how to find lost files on your hard drive using the basic Windows search or by using a third party program like Google Desktop.

This is great as a long term solution, but if you need to find a file quickly in a huge directory, waiting an hour for Google Desktop to index the entire directory is not good enough!

Index Your Files is a alternative program that will allow you to instantly search for files across your entire local or network drives. It’s one of the fastest file searching programs out there.

Not only is it fast, it’s portable! So you can actually take it to any computer on a USB stick and perform a search instantly. This is great for a corporate environment because you can run it on your computer, let it create the index for all your network resources, and then connect the USB drive to any computer on the network and run a search instantly.

The program will use the index already on the USB drive created the first time, so your search results will be instantaneous! That’s great! And don’t worry about the index getting out-dated because IYF will automatically update the index at regular intervals, so just leave it connected to your computer and don’t worry about it again!

There are two tabs in the program, Search and Index. First click on Index and choose Yes when asked if you want to create a new index database.

Click Browse and choose a drive or folder that you want to create the index on. You can create more than one index, so it’s best to create one database per drive.

Once you have added all the indexes you want, click the Start Index button at the bottom left.

The indexing process will begin and you will see the Indexing Status on the right hand side of the screen. Once it goes to Idle, then the indexing is finished. Under Properties, you’ll see the total number of items indexed, the time it took, and the size.

Now go to the Search tab and type in what you are searching for. You can search by file name, file type, file date, file size and also search inside files. You can also use Boolean operators (AND, OR) in the search.

The program creates an index very quickly and it’s very compact in size compared to other programs. You can easily run it off a 2GB USB flash drive or less. You can also import and export indexes, so it’s super easy to pass on the index to a colleague so that they can search instantly also.

Overall, it’s a great program because it is fast, portable and has a lot of great features. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads