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File Explorer searches
I'm having some problems finding a folder which I'm 99% sure is on my computer. The folder is called "workspace" (without the quotes of course) and I created it months ago on either my C: drive or my F: drive; it is *much* more likely that it is on the C: drive but I'm not positive.
When I went into File Explorer, navigated to the F: drive, chose the Search tab and entered workspace in the search box at the top right, it came back fairly quickly and said nothing with that name was found. That was great and matched what I expected so I assumed it was correct. When I did the same in the C: drive, it brought back a number of files and folders that had "workspace" in the name - and even some that had an abbreviation like 'wkspace', which baffles me somewhat - but the thing that really baffles me is that it just keeps searching and searching and searching. It's been going over an hour now and still keeps turning up new hits (none of which are the one I want yet). The progress bar is beyond the downward facing arrow and has half-filled the "X" that is to the right of the downward facing arrow.
I've seen this behaviour time and time again in the search facility in Windows, probably going back to XP: it never really ever gets to the end of the search if it's on the C: drive. Can someone explain this to me? I need the search to look everywhere on the C: drive. It's a big plus if it returns relatively promptly. Instead, it keeps churning and churning without ever seeming to come to an end. It's not like this is a particularly large hard drive; it's only 1 terrabyte and it's not even half full.
Something else that I suspect is related came up while I was poking around with settings: indexing. Am I right in believing that Windows is only going to find things that are in the list of indexed folders relatively quickly? And that the lion's share of the search time is in searching the folders that are NOT indexed?
I don't remember ever telling Windows which folders to index so I'm going to assume that Windows makes some assumptions about that. From the dialogs I saw, it appears that I could choose additional folders to index. Am I right in assuming that simply telling it to index *everything* on C: and F: is a very bad idea? Is that because it's going to take an eternity to index or because it's still going to take a long time to search even when everything is indexed or both? I'm guessing it's the former. I vaguely remember telling Windows to index my hard drive many versions of Windows ago when hard drives were much smaller and it took a staggering amount of time to create that index; I'm not sure I even had the patience to wait until it was finished.
What is the best way to set indexing up in Windows 10? I really don't want to shoot myself in the foot here but I'd sure like the searches to actually find what I'm looking for without taking hours.
If I've got to let the computer run all night to index the whole hard drive, I can live with that. But if its going to take days or weeks and slow down everything else I need to do, then I'm not too keen on that.
I'd value the advice of the experts here.
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