Some of you might have multiple computers at your home like I do. I centralize a lot of my files on one computer. My devices like my laptop have limited space so I access files over the network.
Using the Windows environment, there is one advantage that this OS does that happens to be better than a Linux/NAS set up. This is network search indexing.
On your typical Windows computer, you can enable this feature for local file searching. You can access that by going to the “Indexing Options” part of Windows. You can type that into the Start Menu to access it. From there, you can add more locations. This might be needed if you have a other internal drives or files outside of the Users area of the included locations. You can also optionally adjust advanced options to specify more file types to index. For example, I like to include .txt files to “Index Properties and File Contents“. This will search the internal contents for matching strings. Useful for finding things like account numbers that are text within PDFs for example. Then when you enter values into that seldom used “Search” box on top right of the file folder, it should find those files for you.
Despite this search feature not being that great, it can search files over the network, even if it hasn’t been indexed locally, as long as the host machine has the files indexed. I have yet to find a way without installing third party software to search files on a separate network device. Being able to use any Windows computer to search files on another is super convenient.
For those that are okay using a separate indexed search software, I highly recommend a program called “Everything“, which works well on your own computer, but they will need to be installed on each computer with a bit of configuration to be able to search over the network.