How to add to RAR archive 40k files without using windows search.

I have over 40 thousand files I need to archive spread throughout a drive in different folders. I cannot use windows search because the drive cannot be index and will take quite some time to fix and solve. Is there another method that can allow me to search a drive and add to winrar .rar archive? I've used some file searches but there isn't an option to use rar to archive the search results. One program, effective file search, can allow this, but if I select more than 5k files it crashes! Windows can select them all however if I could manage to have them show up all in a search, which I can't for now. Is there a way to achieve what I'm trying to do? Please Help!!

I don't have indexing turned on for a couple of drives and have no problem with the Search function, as the popup shows it may take longer. It sounds like you'd better fix the problems with the drive before they become a bigger issue.

The search works but incomplete. If i use a 3rd part file searcher it brings of 44k files that I need copied on this drive. If I use windows search it is 14k. It actually depends where I search on the drive. Where I know where most of the files are it is over 20k when I should that folder. If I go to the root H: and search I get WAY less results. Its not searching the entire drives folders and subfolders etc. So I decided to index the drive at first. After 24 hours and quite a few files I paused the index scan and searched the drive with windows and 44k files showed up. However I could not select them all at the same time, probably cause the scan was incomplete and paused.

Does someone know if windows indexing searches within rar folders? Would a file within a rar folder show up in windows search after the drive has been indexed?

Right now I'm trying the option always search file names and contents in the windows search option menu. Hopefully all the files will show up. Even if it takes hours to search its better than a day of indexing. I will sort out the problem with the drive asap though. Any idea how long scanning the drive for errors takes?

Forget about the crippled built-in Windows search, it doesn't give correct results, and the index takes way too much to get in good shape. For search in Windows 7 third party programs are a must.

For file search I use File Locator Lite (the free version) which works ok with many files. I tried selecting tons of them and, while it becomes noticeably slow, it still works acceptably.

However, a better built-in solution could be to use the command line. Copy all files that matches the criteria to a temporary folder, then just rar it using normal Windows Explorer. For example:

Code:

xcopy g:\*.jpg c:\temp /s /f

This will copy all jpg files on the G drive (incluiding all subdirectories) to C:\temp folder, recreating whatever folder structure they are. Look at the xcopy help (xcopy /?) for further reference.
This one in contrast:

Code:

for /r g:\ %f in (*.jpg) do copy "%f" "c:\temp\"

Will copy the same files but without recreating the folders (ie all together in destination folder). Look here for some references too.
Which you use will depend on how you want your rar archive to be arranged.

In any case, compressing all the separated files from the temp folder is now trivial. Remember to delete them afterwards so they don't waste your HD space.

I was thinking of just copying the entire search results to a folder, but it totals 155 GB. With winrar it would preserve file order which is awesome. Thanks for sharing that method, but am unsure if it will be any better than the search windows uses just because its from a command line. Wouldn't the results be the same. It would be a trivial matter if the index would complete and not take days to accomplish. I've tried a few programs but if I select more than 5k they crash. I'm trying to select 40k so... I have that program already and it won't let me select more than 5k and its the pro version.

TJGOA said:

Right now I'm trying the option always search file names and contents in the windows search option menu. Hopefully all the files will show up. Even if it takes hours to search its better than a day of indexing. I will sort out the problem with the drive asap though. Any idea how long scanning the drive for errors takes?

This doesn't work either, just 7 k results where I know there are 44k! This is frustrating!!!

TJGOA said:

With winrar it would preserve file order which is awesome.

What do you mean by "file order". Files within folders don't have any ordering.

TJGOA said:

Thanks for sharing that method, but am unsure if it will be any better than the search windows uses just because its from a command line. Wouldn't the results be the same.

Results will be widely different. Command line is not that relevant, but in fact has an advantage over GUIs here. I'm suggesting primarily because copy and xcopy don't rely on the broken Windows Search service, which gets consistently wrong results. Also, being command line only means that the computer don't has to manage the screen output and thus you avoid large overheads of managing lists with thousands of elements, which is always slow.

Where any method will crawl is when copying 150GB of files over. That itself will take some time.
Command line utilities don't waste time drawing fancy GUIs and just spend time doing the actual work. This is a good point when you have that many files to be processed.

TJGOA said:

I have over 40 thousand files I need to archive spread throughout a drive in different folders. I cannot use windows search because the drive cannot be index and will take quite some time to fix and solve. Is there another method that can allow me to search a drive and add to winrar .rar archive?

The highly regarded 3rd-party Everything Search facilitates exactly what you want, I believe (it has its own index of all file names, having nothing to do with Windows Search).

Do your search (which by file name is effectively "instantaneous" as you type, across ALL drives of your system unless you limit the search in some way) to get the files you want appearing in the search results window.

Then simply select them all (select one of them, than CTRL+a to light them all up).

Then right-click on the now all-selected list, and select the WinRar item on the standard Windows Explorer popup menu, and click on the "add to archive..." item and name it whatever you want. The full path for each file will be retained in the output RAR/ZIP archive file, assuming you have that option checked (which it is by default).

Is this what you want?