Hello All,

 

I'm having a problem with locating files on my new Unraid server. My previous setup was 8 disk Areca raid card on a server running windows server 08 x64. My client PC's are all Win 7 x64. So, I want to see if I have a movie - I do a search on the server, Server 08 is indexed, it passes the indexing into Windows 7, long story short, I know if I have it within about 5 seconds. Great.

 

It's working dramatically differently now. I wasn't sure if I remembered to back up some movies or not, so I did a search for "Halloween". That search did find it, but it took 11.5 minutes to do so. Presumably, it's also spinning up every drive on the server while doing this. This is kind of a problem for me.

 

I'm fairly confident after some forum searching that there is no way to index UNC's with Window's 7, at least not any way that works reliably. I tried the Win7 Library Tool, that didn't work.

 

I've also tried Cache_Dirs, which presumably should resolve this very issue. Clearly that's not working for me, and I'm sure it's because I've misconfigured it.  I've added it to my /boot/cofig/go file as

 /boot/cache_dirs -w

.

 

What is the simplest way for me to fix my problem? I don't really care how I do it, either by getting working indexing, or by reconfiguring cache_dirs.

 

Thanks!

You could use XBMC. It indexes all your movies.

I've been looking for a good indexing/search method myself. Tried Locate32, but doesnt seem as reliable as i would like. Anyone have any other options or methods they use?

I cron'd a simple find > files.txt that I grep when needed. Have meant to make a web query that spits out href'd results from the grep but someone here must have something better.

I have the same situation as Ouze. The cache directories is working fine, when i browse the folder structure of the share its all there instantly and doesnt spin up drives. When i actually search for something, it spins up each drive and takes a few minutes to complete.

I alternate between XBMC and Boxee on my HTPC, and it's a good product, but it's not really a solution for my problem. I need to be able to search for many different types of files (pdf, text, excel, mkv, iso, everything) and I'd like to be able to sort them in explorer (or at least an explorer like interface) so I can sort by size, date, etc. For that reason Google Desktop Search also fails. I tried Locate32 which looked promising but after a few days gave less then reliable results (finding files I deleted, not finding files that were there, etc etc - but those problems are a different post, really)

 

There's got to be a way to search the server without it taking from 5 to 15 minutes to return results, right?

Ok, I found a good replacement - Index Your Files, from, unexpectedly, IndexYourFiles.com. It took about 45 seconds to index 94k files\6tb, and you can set it to rescan however often you want. I set it to scan once an hour. I also tested it to make sure that it doesn't spin up drives when doing the 45 second index, and it does not (which presumably is the magic of cache_dirs).

 

This will work, I think, although I'd still love to see a way to innately snap into Windows Search 4\Win 7.

Awesome.... Went and downloaded Index Your Files and so far so good. I ran it through a battery of tests, renamed file, deleted, moved, etc. Spun down all drives after each action before a index rescan and never did my drives spin up. Very nice. This looks like what ive been looking for as my workaround for the lack of Windows 7 indexing. Thanks!

I use Folder Print to create an .html file of \tv, \movies \whatever, and save those files to my local disk. I can pull up the list in my browser, ctrl+f and the term. BAM! Found it. Folder Print and Bulk Rename Utility have been in my holster for many years. Great little programs.

 

I don't have issue with cache_dirs. It just _works_. No spinup when I want to view a dir. Here's my code:

/boot/cache_dirs -d 5 -m 3 -M 5 -w