Sharing Folders and Files on the Windows Home Server 2011 : Searching the Shared Folders

After you’ve used Windows Home Server for a while, you could easily end up with thousands—heck, even tens of thousands—of files on the server shares. This is particularly true if you have a large amount of data stored on the Windows Home Server shares (remember the old computing law that data expands to fill the space available for storage), several Windows clients, and several users. Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable to treat the Windows Home Server shares as a kind of virtual basement where you toss a bunch of files and folders; however, there will almost certainly come a day when you need to actually find a particular file or folder in that mess. Assuming you have a life, you probably don’t want to waste valuable chunks of that life by scouring the server shares manually.

Instead, you need to put the powerful Windows Home Server Search feature to work for you. You can use Search to scour the shared folder not only for filenames, but file contents and metadata (such as file size and properties such as the artist name and music genre). You might think you could only do this on the Windows Home Server itself, but if you have the Connector software installed in a Windows 7, Vista, or XP client, you can perform these powerful searches right from the client!

Windows Home Server Search works by indexing the entire contents of just the following locations on the server:

• Users— This is Windows Home Server’s user profiles folder (C:\Users), which in most cases contains only a single profile for the Administrator user. (By default, Windows Search also indexes the All Users profile.)

• Internet Explorer History— The Administrator account’s list of visited websites.

• Start Menu— The contents of the Start menu folders.

• Shares— The Windows Home Server shared folders: Documents, Music, Pictures, Recorded TV, and Videos, as well as the Shadow Copies folder.

These strike me as sensible defaults because there isn’t likely to be anything else on your server that you’d want to search. However, you can control what Windows Search indexes and force a rebuild of the index. Log on to the server and select Start, Control Panel, Indexing Options. This displays the Indexing Options dialog box shown in Figure 1. To customize the search engine, you have two choices:

• Modify—Click this button to display the Indexed Locations dialog box, which enables you to change the locations included in the index. Activate the check box for each drive or folder you want to include.
  
  
• Advanced—Click this button to display the Advanced Options dialog box, which enables you to index encrypted files, change the index location, specify the file types (extensions) that you want include in or exclude from the index, and even add network shares to the index. You can also click Rebuild to re-create the index, which is useful if you find that Windows Search doesn’t seem to be returning the correct results.
  
  

Figure 1. Use Control Panel’s Indexing Options to configure Windows Search.

To run a search, open the shared folder on the client PC, and then use the Search feature (such as the Search box in Windows 7 and Vista) to type your search text.

Simple text searches aren’t going to radically boost anyone’s productivity or help you find a file needle in a hard disk haystack. To take searching to the next level, you need to know about another powerful search feature: Windows Search syntax.

When you run a standard text search, Windows Search looks for matches not only in the filename and the file contents, but in the file metadata: the properties associated with each file. That’s cool and all, but what if you want to match only a particular property? For example, if you’re searching the Music share for albums that include the word “Rock” in the title, a basic search on “rock” will also return music in which the artist’s name includes rock and the album genre is Rock. This is not good.

To fix this kind of thing, you can create powerful and targeted searches by using a special syntax in your search queries. For file properties, you use the following syntax:

property:value

Here, property is the name of the file property you want to search on, and value is the criteria you want to use. The property can be any of the metadata categories used by Windows Home Server. For example, the categories in a music folder include Name, Track Number, Title, Artist, Album Title, and Bit Rate. Right-click any column header in Windows Explorer’s Details view to see more properties such as Genre and Duration, and you can click More to see the complete list.

Here are a few things to bear in mind:

• If the property name is a single word, use that word in your query. For example, the following code matches music in which the Artist property is Coldplay:

  artist:coldplay

• If the property name uses two or more words, remove the spaces between the words, and use the resulting text in your query. For example, the following code matches pictures in which the Date Taken property is August 23, 2011:

  datetaken:8/23/2011

• If the value uses two or more words and you want to match the exact phrase, surround the phrase with quotation marks. For example, the following code matches music in which the Genre property is Alternative & Punk:

  genre:"alternative & punk"

• If the value uses two or more words and you want to match both words in any order, surround them with parentheses. For example, the following code matches music in which the Album property contains the words “Head” and “Goats” in any order:

  album:(head goats)

• If you want to match files in which a particular property has no value, use empty braces, [], as the value. For example, the following code matches files in which the Tags property is empty:

  tags:[]

You can also refine your searches with the following operators and wildcards:

• >— Matches files in which the specified property is greater than the specified value. For example, the following code matches pictures in which the Date Taken property is later than January 1, 2011:

  datettaken:>1/1/2011

• >=— Matches files in which the specified property is greater than or equal to the specified value. For example, the following code matches files in which the Size property is greater than or equal to 100MB (use m for MB, and g for GB):

  size:>=100m

• <— Matches files in which the specified property is less than the specified value. For example, the following code matches music in which the Bit Rate property is less than 128 (kilobits per second):

  bitrate:<128k

• <=— Matches files in which the specified property is less than or equal to the specified value. For example, the following code matches files in which the Size property is less than or equal to 1024 bytes:

  size:<=1024

• ..— Matches files in which the specified property is between (and including) two values. For example, the following code matches files in which the Date Modified property is between and including August 1, 2011 and August 31, 2011:

  datemodified:8/1/2011..8/31/2011

• *— Substitutes for multiple characters. For example, the following code matches music in which the Album property includes the word “Hits”:

  album:*hits

• ?— Substitutes for a single character. For example, the following code matches music in which the Artists property begins with “Blu” and includes any character in the fourth position:

  artists:blu?

For even more sophisticated searches, you can combine multiple criteria using Boolean operators:

• AND (or +)— Use this operator to match files that meet all your criteria. For example, the following code matches pictures in which the Date Taken property is later than January 1, 2011 and the Size property is greater than 1000000 bytes:

  datetaken:>1/1/2011 AND size:>1000000

• OR— Choose this option to match files that meet at least one of your criteria. For example, the following code matches music in which the Genre property is either Rock or Blues:

  genre:rock OR genre:blues

• NOT (or –)— Choose this option to match files that do not meet the criteria. For example, the following code matches pictures in which the Type property is not JPEG:

  type:NOT jpeg