If you haven't heard of Everything, I can't recommend it enough. It will index all of your files in seconds and search through them in the blink of an eye.
Everything only works on local NTFS volumes, though. Is there anything like this that searches network shares?
I have a SAN that I want to do crazy searches through. We're talking terabytes of data. What do you use?
Actually, Everything Search can search on the network, but you have to create a file list yourself.
Go to Tools -> File List Editor Click Edit -> Add folder --> here, select a shared folder on the network and hit OK. Everything Search might freeze and it might take from 1 to 10 minutes or longer to create a list so be patient.
When you see files in the list editor, click File -> Save As... - and save the file somewhere.
Close the File List Editor, in Everything Search main window, click Tools -> Options, from the left hand menu select Indexes --> File Lists, click Add button, select the file that you saved previously, Apply settings and that's it.
From now on when you search it will display results from the network as well.
Update: You can automate the file list creation and schedule it with Windows Task Scheduler. Just create a BAT file with the following:
"C:\Program Files\Everything\Everything.exe" -create-filelist C:\file_lists\filelist.efu S:\
Modify the code above to save the file list where you want (C:\file_lists\filelist.efu) and specify your own drive to index (S:/).
Then in Task Scheduler create new task to open this BAT file for example once a day.
Then make sure you point Everything search to the file you create with BAT file. (Tools -> Options, from the left hand menu select Indexes --> File Lists, click Add button, select the file (C:\file_lists\filelist.efu), Apply settings)
For search volumes of that size, I've used a Google Search Appliance. They can be expensive, but they are very customizable and they do an incredible job of indexing things. As a bonus, it will not only index file shares, but you can point it at web resources as well for indexing.
LAN Search Pro will search Windows shares in an entire domain, workgroup, or server.
