Ease your search through gigabytes of data with Copernic Desktop Search
If you hate spending time looking for that crucial file amidst the scrambled data on your hard disk, meet Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) (www.copernic.com). This tool helps you search through your personal files, pictures, music and videos and find the file in just few clicks.
Step 1. Personalise Your Settings
These indicate items such as PDFs, Word documents, e-mails, etc, to be indexed and consist of paths that point to the location of the item. To access these settings, go to Options > Files. This tab shows you default folders monitored by CDS. To add a drive, say, D:, or a folder to this list, click Add in the ‘Add a Folder’ window and make an appropriate selection. Keep clicking OK to exit.
Step 2. Making It Work
By default, CDS does not display EXE files in its search results. To turn this feature on, go to Options > Advanced. In this tab, add ‘.exe;’ in the box labelled ‘Additional file types to index’.
Step 3. Types Of Search
Copernic has various search categories such as Emails, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. These have predefined filters. Music, for example, has filters such as MP3, WMA, WAV, etc. Hence, when searching for an MP3 file, click ‘music’ in the ‘Search’ field and specify its name. To play the file found, select it and click the ‘Play’ icon in the left hand corner listed in the Details section.
Step 4. Eliminating The Results
Refine your search by specifying information about the file such as its type, the date it was created, etc. Doing so narrows down the search. For example, go to the ‘File Type’ tab and select ‘Text Document (.txt)’ from the dropdown box to search for text files. Specify the time by going to Date > This week and press [Enter]. The ‘Quick preview’ pane lets you scan the contents of the file.
Step 5. Finding Your E-mails And Attachments
By default, CDS does search within e-mails and attachments in Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express mailboxes as well as their ‘Contacts’ folders. Check the ‘Also Search in attachments’ checkbox to search e-mail attachments. The ‘Refine search’ fields has filters such as ‘Subject’, ‘From’, ‘To’, etc. So you can specify the name of the sender in the ‘From’ field and CDS will find the appropriate e-mail for you.
Step 6. Index Update
If your folder goes through regular content updates, then you can schedule CDS to index more often. To do so, go to Options > Index update. In this tab, you can specify the time of indexing in ‘Perform daily indexing tasks at’ to suit your need. Note that by default, the folders in the indexing list are scanned after a period of 4 days. Tweak the ‘Scan file folder for changes every’ field to change the scanning frequency.