topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday April 18, 2024, 8:32 pm
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: File Finding Utility  (Read 3631 times)

rah1

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2010
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
File Finding Utility
« on: September 03, 2010, 03:39 PM »
I've been looking for a file finding utility but can't find one that fits our needs.

We're a manufacturing company so we have lots of documents; CAD files, Quality Instructions, Invoices, POs, etc. Over time we've migrated everything to PDF files with meaningful names. They are stored in hierarchical subdirectories so you can manually drill down to what you are looking for but you might have to go through 6 - 7 levels.

We've been using a utility that I like a lot; Index Your Files. It creates indexes of your files so searching on a name or part of name is extremely fast. But like so many other file utilities, they are aimed at individuals. I've got 40 or so users and I've setup each one with Index Your Files. Each copy has to update it's own databases a couple of times a day creating a lot of duplicated load on the network.

I'd like a utility that comes in two parts. I'd like one part to an administrative and index building utility that would create all indexes and then update them on a schedule. The other part would be a searching-only utility that used the indexes built by the admin utility. The only configuration you would have in the search utility would be to select the indexes you're interested in searching.

I've tried Locate32 but couldn't get it to work right and documentation is sketchy.

Any suggestions? After all the looking I've done at existing utilities, I would think the two part model would be a great innovation because it would be applicable to individuals as well as multi-users scenarios.

Thanks.

superboyac

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 6,347
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: File Finding Utility
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2010, 04:09 PM »
This is a great idea.  I'm all for it.

First, see if the program Everything can do this.  It's not exactly what you described, but it may be useable.  If you haven't tried it, you'll be blown away by its speed.

But, yeah, I'd also want a two part utility where one deals with building the index and the other (the client) is the interface for the search.  great idea.

mouser

  • First Author
  • Administrator
  • Joined in 2005
  • *****
  • Posts: 40,900
    • View Profile
    • Mouser's Software Zone on DonationCoder.com
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: File Finding Utility
« Reply #2 on: September 03, 2010, 04:15 PM »
seems like a perfect job for FARR, except for the fact that farr doesn't have an option to use indices (yet); but it does sound like exactly the use that i've envisioned farr might be well suited for in a business environment.

Crush

  • Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 402
  • Hello dude!
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: File Finding Utility
« Reply #3 on: September 04, 2010, 12:52 AM »
CanĀ“t you set the position of the database file in locate to a network drive and use only one instance to update it? This should be no problem. (->Settings->Databases)

cmpm

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 2,026
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: File Finding Utility
« Reply #4 on: September 04, 2010, 03:32 AM »
2 come to mind by SoftPerfect

http://www.softperfe...oducts/searchengine/

http://www.softperfe....com/products/lspro/

LAN Search Pro seems close to your needs.