Hi,

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on ways of locating files on an UnRAID server?

 

What I'm thinking here is that I initially used UnRAID to store Music, TV and Movies and that's still its main purpose.  Those types of shares are nicely laid out and easy to find what I'm after.  But as time goes on, I'm starting to use UnRAID as my general dumping ground for all sorts of things, which is great but comes with the headache of remembering where everything is.  I try to keep things organised, but there's always going to be "now where did I save that file" situations and for those times I'd like an easy way to find what I'm looking for.

 

Sure I can drop to command line and do a find (locate'd be nice, but it's not part of the standard UnRAID setup), but that's a bit of a pain as although I use cache_dirs to a few levels, it's inevitably going to wake up my drives as it searches and I'm probably sitting at a Windows PC at the time and doing a telnet in just for this seems awkward.

 

What I'd really like is a web front-end to a back-end process but there doesn't seem to be much out there.  I briefly looked at Lucene / Solr but that looks overly complex for what I'm wanting to do.

 

So I just wondered how others are managing this?

I've used Locate32 on my windows computers for ages.

Before I had my server I had it index my PC and all external drvies and CD-R's

Now I only have it index my PC and UnRaid 

 

It's an old and simple program but still works well and is blazingly fast for a filename search.

It idexes the drives and creates a database onto your PC. (my PC database is 46MB and 10TB Media-Unraid one is around 1MB)

Once the database is done one can do searches even if the server (or USB-drive or whatever...) is down or disconnected.

It can do MD5 checksums too if you have the time but haven't tried that.

 

Beats the windows search hands down. (atleast for my needs) 

 

 

seeker, thanks for the info.  I quite like Locate32 also.  My personal fave is Everything, but it has a limitation in that it can only index local filesystems due to the method it uses to find files.

 

I guess I could put Locate's DB files on a cache disk but I'd like to move away from using a client tool as it still means I'd need to make sure its installed everywhere I intend to search and sometimes that could be a pain.

 

I'd love to have a simple web page which I can visit from anywhere and use to search a back-end database of what's on my UnRAID array.

I've used Locate32 on my windows computers for ages.

Before I had my server I had it index my PC and all external drvies and CD-R's

Now I only have it index my PC and UnRaid 

 

It's an old and simple program but still works well and is blazingly fast for a filename search.

It idexes the drives and creates a database onto your PC. (my PC database is 46MB and 10TB Media-Unraid one is around 1MB)

Once the database is done one can do searches even if the server (or USB-drive or whatever...) is down or disconnected.

It can do MD5 checksums too if you have the time but haven't tried that.

 

Beats the windows search hands down. (atleast for my needs) 

+1 - love Locate32

Just read that doesn't solve your issue... you can look at using linux's indexing search feature 'slocate'  I used that for a time and set a cron job to update the database regularly.

 

Another +1 for Locate.  I have it set to index the most used shares on a daily basis, and the not-so-used ones on a weekly basis.  I have it set to run after my nightly backups, so drives are already spun up.

Yea, it would be real nice to access my unraid box via web page and have a real nice file management utility built in. I know those things take resources and chew up memory, so I would probably have it run on my Windows 7 workhorse computer and then just save the results to the DB. If something like that even is around.

 

If your going to be on windows 7 computer you can use indexyourfiles. It can scan your network shares or mapped network drives. I have a separate db for each network computer including my Unraid server.  It does have to be manually refreshed but if you don't change files too often that shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure on the formatting of the database but I bet you could get it to a web page if you know some coding. It takes about 6 minutes to scan my server of about 20TB and 754,038 files.

If you're looking for a tool that will search for files by name and is able to search inside files take a look at superfinderxt.  It's what the search in Windows should be.

If your going to be on windows 7 computer you can use indexyourfiles. It can scan your network shares or mapped network drives. I have a separate db for each network computer including my Unraid server.  It does have to be manually refreshed but if you don't change files too often that shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure on the formatting of the database but I bet you could get it to a web page if you know some coding. It takes about 6 minutes to scan my server of about 20TB and 754,038 files.

 

I'm trying this little utility now. Pretty cool. It doesn't let me include network path names, just mapped drives. Not a big deal, but it does seem to operate pretty quickly. And built into it is a pretty nice search. I'll use it for a while and see how it goes. Thanks.

 

**update**

The program is letting me use direct network paths. Very nice. So I can even break down my indexed database by share or however I want to make it easy for me to find something.