Excluding some drives from search

[swiftie]

I have a large, slow, external disk array used for backup purposes. My backups run overnight, finishing around 03:00 but something is keeping the drives busy through the day. I suspect indexing, though it could also be internal housekeeping on the device. The noise is a distraction...

I'm turning off indexing as an experiment, but I suspect this will make system-wide searches incredibly slow.

Is there any way to default the search to exclude this device (the search would nearly always find the target on my fast drives, so no point finding copies on the backup media).

In other words, can I specify that a search will scan only indexed devices?

A related question: Is there a simple way to monitor the origin of all I/O to a particular drive? Then I'd know why it was busy.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

In other words, can I specify that a search will scan only indexed devices?

Yes, write "indexing options" in the search box of the Start menu, or from the Control Panel in Icon view.

Technically that allows you to exclude drives from the indexing, which is what you actually want to do. Search works by looking up stuff in the index, which per-se is pretty fast (the entire point of indexing), it's building the index that is intensive.

Is there a simple way to monitor the origin of all I/O to a particular drive?

Yes, write "resource monitor" in the search box of the Start menu, or from Task Manager in the Performance tab, or from somewhere else.

Then in the Disk tab you see what is going on. If it is a system process may be harder to find out as it's not clearly labeled, but afaik the only system process that can do that is the indexing or something clearly identifiable anyway.

 

[swiftie]

Indexing Options

I went into Indexing Options and unchecked the two drives mapped to the External Array.

I confess that I'm not sure what effect this will have; whether it will just stop the drives from being indexed, or from being searched. Even Google failed to come up with an answer to this puzzle, so I'll have to experiment.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

if you unchecked them, they won't be indexed.

Afaik, this means Search won't find anything that is stored on them unless you specifically ask it from an advanced search, and then its performance will suck as it will have to crawl around to find stuff just like in XP days.

From indexing options you can define folders to index too, so if you have data on that array you can tell it to index it, while not indexing the folder containing backups.

In case you need to search within your backups, you can use Everything, it builds its own search index pretty faster than Win7's own indexing. Even a few TB of data get indexed in a little more than 5 minutes.

 

[swiftie]

I've managed to achieve exactly the result that I didn't want. My J: drive is now not indexed, it takes a long time to do a search, and it tells me that it would go faster if it were indexed.

For anyone joining the thread at this point, the intention was that a search would bypass the J: drive completely (it's backup, I'd like to be able to search it is I specifically wantes to search the backup drives.

 

[bobafetthotmail]

try to tell it to index the drive but exclude the folder where you have backups in.

Or use the tool I posted above to search in the non-indexed areas.

 

[Sir George]

I've managed to achieve exactly the result that I didn't want. My J: drive is now not indexed, it takes a long time to do a search, and it tells me that it would go faster if it were indexed.

For anyone joining the thread at this point, the intention was that a search would bypass the J: drive completely (it's backup, I'd like to be able to search it is I specifically wantes to search the backup drives.

I use Agent Ransack for searching and find it a very useful utility;

Agent Ransack - Download

HTH