WDS and huge index files?

[Jimdoria]

Windows Desktop Search is not my first choice, but I love OneNote and you need WDS in order to search OneNote, and I balk at the idea of having 2 search engines on my PC, so WDS is it.

It usually works fine, and I hardly notice it, but today I got a balloon popping up telling me I'm out of space on my C: drive. Well, I've been downloading more videos lately, and my usual amount of software, but this still surprised me. I hadn't expected to run into space issues for a while yet.

Turns out, WDS created a 35GB index file on my machine! So that's where all my free space went.

Does anyone else who uses WDS find that it creates huge index files? The drive is only 100GB all told, so this index is substantially bigger than the actual content it's supposed to be indexing, considering most of my HD space is taken up with non-indexed files such as videos and programs. My entire My Documents folder is only about 9GB, which  includes my outlook data store.

I'm thinking of just deleting this file. Does anyone know of any negative repercussions I will experience if I do?

[Darwin]

Interesting question, Jim. I just tried to check the size of my index and Windows won't let me view the files! I can't even see their size - off to try Treesize Pro now...

OK - tried that, apparently my WDS index is... 0 bytes! What the...?!

I recently reinstalled X1 Pro and let it "replace WDS". Perhaps it disables WDS while it's at it... If so, everything works as expected, including Outlook search (just verified this), so I'm happy!

FWIW, I also triple checked WDS options and I haven't moved the index, so it's not an issue of my looking in the wrong place 

Finally, I think deleting the index and letting it rebuild itself is probably the best idea - be interesting to see how big the resulting index is...

[Jimdoria]

The gargantuan file was in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Projects\SystemIndex and was similarly named to other files that were 4KB, 1, KB, 171 KB... nothing at all like the 35GB monster.

I deleted it and rebooted. Search still seems to be working fine and now I've got 1/3rd of my hard drive back. However, there's a new file in there. It's now at 6.8 megs and seems to grow by about 1K every 5 seconds.

Very weird. Guess I'll have to keep an eye on it from now on. I'm not too happy to have another thing on my list of stuff I have to remember to do.

[J-Mac]

I use OneNote 2007 but no WDS - I absolutely hate it. You can still search OneNote. It just won't be fast and the text-in-graphics won't be as accurate.

Jim

[Jimdoria]

What do you hate, J-Mac - WDS or ON2007 w/o WDS?

I thought WDS was required for ON2007. You make it sound like no functionality is lost if you pass on WDS, only performance. Is that really the case?

I made up my mind a while ago that desktop search software was just not one of those battles I was going to get emotionally caught up in. Although I'd read about Google, Copernic, WDS, etc. I'd never installed any of them until ON2007 forced WDS onto my machine.

Since my hardware tends to be older, slower performance would probably be a deal breaker anyway. ON2007 is slow enough as it is!

[J-Mac]

Jimdoria,

Man I butchered that sentence! Syntactic ambiguity at its best...

Sorry about that. WDS is what I hate, not ON2007. And yes, you can run OneNote just fine without WDS. It is not a requirement. I can search within OneNote but it isn't that fast. Supposedly searches for text-in-graphics is better with WDS, though since I rarely ever do that I can't say.

As for desktop search, I use both Locate32 and Everything. Both are lighting fast and neither spends any significant CPU resources indexing all the time.

Jim

[MrCrispy]

You could limit the WDS search to just the OneNote files (limiting it by file type or by folder location) and then have the best of both worlds. On one of my old pc's I have WDS set to only search the start menu.

[J-Mac]

You could limit the WDS search to just the OneNote files (limiting it by file type or by folder location) and then have the best of both worlds. On one of my old pc's I have WDS set to only search the start menu.

-MrCrispy (February 26, 2009, 09:59 PM)

My biggest problem with WDS is that it indexes whenever it pleases - can't be configured. Even if you limit the file type. It is setup as a service and you cannot stop it; even setting it to manual, it starts anyway. I even disabled it and it started up by itself! When it decides to look around and index it takes focus away from whatever application you happen to be in. I must use Dragon NaturalSpeaking to input text if it is a large amount, and WDS would quietly start, steal focus, and if I didn't notice it right away I would dictate for ten minutes or more to the air, because when focus is stolen Dragon isn't typing.

MS Support and I went around and around with this - no solution, and they freely admitted it is a problem. But not a big enough one for them to bother to fix. Somehow that did not surprise me...

Thanks!

Jim