[X4U] indexing drives

revDAVE coolcat at hostalive.com
Fri Apr 29 17:17:26 PDT 2005


On 3/4/05 9:40 AM, "DG Hagey" <dghagey at mycybernet.net> wrote:

> Is indexing drives necessary? I have a drive with 3 partitions and 1 of
> them stops indexing about 45 minutes into the process. The other
> partitions index fine. It has 21 000 files that take up 60GB. I'm
> running 10.3.8 on a iMac G3 600MHz w/512MB RAM.

AFAIK -  indexing drives is absolutely NOT necessary.  I believe the main
reason for it ...  Is for the ability to do 'content related searches' from
the Finder... this means that you would be able to search through the actual
content of your text files instead of only looking at the file names ...
This sort of thing. - do you need this?

In the past I have attempted to do indexing - however I have found the
ability to do content related searches to be very poor on the Mac - and not
at all worth the trouble - since the find mechanism was very basic and poor
...  You can simply put words in there and it would find every variation of
those words - but you could not limit it with  advanced searching - the type
found on good current search engines...

 the other downside - is that it created a very large invisible database and
wasted a tremendous amount of space - basically for nothing...


***  now - on the other hand I certainly hope that Tiger and spotlight has
vastly improved this antiquated technology...

*  has anybody had a chance to check out spotlight and done some cool
detailed 'advanced search engine type'  searches? -  is a great?



--
Thanks - RevDave
CoolCat at hostalive.com
[db-lists]




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