Visible Volume labels into Everything offline indexes

[ChrisGreaves]

I have read "VOLUME LABEL Problem" and "Why does indexing the "Volume label" takes very long? And removing it and indexing?" and am still unsure of what to do, so:

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Each of about a dozen USB driuves is identified with an external (adhesive) label as "USB 03" or similar.
I have made extensive use of this scheme in various catalogues and notes on my system

In Everything I search the external drive - which I think of as "USB 03" and add four columns that seem relevant to me:-

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Of those four added columns, only "Volume Label" seems relevant to my purpose. Of course I must mount each USB drive (and for that matter any memory keys "MK 01", "MK 02" and so on) and use the Right-click , Rename to make that machine-readable label correspond to the visible label.

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I think that this is what I want, for now, while the USB external drive is unplugged/offline, I can have a dozen searchable catalogues that will identify a file as being ON a drive whose external label I can read.

Please and thank you, am I on the right track?

If so, then:-
I have a vague feeling that I can have Everything hold the catalogues of these external drives on line, so that if I had, say a hundred external devices, I could ask Everything to search all catalogued devices - online and offline - to locate a specific file, no matter where it is stored.

Cheers Chris

[therube]

Wouldn't setting the Indexes to (NOT) 'Automatically remove offline volumes' & same letter but different hard drive (including using online:) do it?

[ChrisGreaves]

... to (NOT) 'Automatically remove offline volumes' & same letter but different hard drive (including using online:) do it?

Oh now I get it. You and NotNull are going to have a game of shuttlecock and battledore with my mind!!!

Before posting I had a feeling that there was a solution that I had seen in my early days. "removing offline" was it.

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This I have now set up/turned on and there is drive F: - not plugged in.

I will tomorrow play around with three different unencrypted volumes.
I suspect that all three will map to drive F:.

When I do a search for a file, I want/hope to see the Volume Label in the Result List so that I can see, immediately, from the Result List, that I must dig the visibly-labeled "USB 03" out of the box.
Please don't tell me how (yet!); this bit I can do in a few minutes.
As well I want to digest that topic to which you pointed me.
Thanks again (both of you)

(LATER) I suspect that there is/may be a difference in handling volume labels for unencrypted drives, and for encrypted drives. I shall for now focus only on unencrypted drives, There are complications (in my head). An unencrypted drive can have a volume label, and that drive can have an encrypted container. That encrypted container, when mounted, is assigned another drive letter and, I suppose, could have another volume label. C

Cheers, Chris

[NotNull]

Easiest would be to index the Volume Label property.
That way, for each file the volume label will be known by Everything.
Adding a Volume Label column to the Everything resultlist would therefor reveal the drive each file is on (see below).

However ...
There were issues in the past (label changes weren't picked up) and there were some changes later on.
I am not aware of the current state of affairs.
So .. bit of a useless reply and I mainly responded to be "in the loop" when a real answer follows

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[ChrisGreaves]

So .. bit of a useless reply and I mainly responded to be "in the loop" when a real answer follows

No reply is useless until I say so. And you know full well that even confirmation that I am on the wrong tracks is a Great Time Saver!

OK. Small steps.
I spent the morning cataloguing every USB HDD/SSD and memory key that I could find; got a lot of paper-filing done in the process.

I selected three drives: "USB 03" and"USB 06" (external HDDs) and "Key 02" (a memory key.
I renamed each device with a 6-character Volume label and set "Volume Label" as a column heading.
I then loaded music files (ext:MP3) to each drive.
I plugged each drive in serially, and made sure that "Automatically remove offline volumes" was checked OFF for each of the three instances.

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This is what I saw while the third device was plugged in. This "drive F" is still online, whereas "USB 03" and "Key 02" are by now offline; that is, unplugged from the laptop.
So far so good.

Then I unplugged the "USB 06" and went looking for a specific file of music

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And this is how we have fun in Bonavista when the windchill is -24c and the winds are from the North.

Small steps.

At this time I am confident that if all my external storage is tucked away in the fire-resistant safe, I can see where Lohengrin is hiding. This is what I want.

Now for what I want to avoid:-
Suppose I have seven IT students who drop in daily for coaching, each bringing a memory key. After seven days seven different memory keys will have been inserted and if I do nothing else, I suspect that seven extra "F:" drives will have been indexed. Of course I will be unlikely to find Lohengrin on those drives, so a search for Lohengrin.MP3 should still turn up only my "USB 03", "USB 06" and "Key 02".
But once I start a more general search - MSWord's "Document 1.DOC" as a simple example - I am liable to be peppered with ten or more offline copies, am I not?

I think I need to think about how to identify ONLY specific sets of offline volumes when searching. Possibly something I have not yet mastered such as a special filter that (in the case of music files) would restrict searches to ONLY my encrypted drive T: and those three archive drives my "USB 03", "USB 06" and "Key 02".

I am using "music" files here as an example; typically I might want to search my nightly and weekly backup drives for a missing document, but these drives are encrypted which introduces another layer of knowledge for me, and I'm not there yet.

Thanks in advance for any comments on my current status.
Cheers, Chris

[froggie]

Chris -
Thank you for this post. I have a similar situation with my backups and various portable drives and this has inspired me to add volume labels to them and index them more systematically.

Perhaps a separate instance of Everything, set up much as you have detailed, except not indexing my running computer, would be the way to go. I would only run this instance when I was updating the backups, etc. or when I wanted to inquire about files on the backups. My main Everything would be setup to delete offline drives, so I would not have to deal with transient removables.

What do you think?

[NotNull]

Or ...

Uncheck Automatically include new removable volumes (Options => Indexes => NTFS).

New external NTFS volumes still can be added manually (select the drive and check Include in database ).

[froggie]

Or ...

Uncheck Automatically include new removable volumes (Options => Indexes => NTFS).

New external NTFS volumes still can be added manually (select the drive and check Include in database ).

That might well be more convenient than a separate instance. A filter on !F: would keep the removable devices from showing up in searches, but maybe you have a better suggestion for a filter.

[NotNull]

Maybe online: / !offline: or drive-type:, depending on what you want to show/hide ?

drive-type:

Search for files and folders belonging to a volume with the specified drive type.

Can be one of the following values:

Unknown
No Root Dir
Removable
Fixed
Remote
CD-Rom
RAM Disk

Examples:
drive-type:fixed
drive-type:removable

[NotNull]

And this is how we have fun in Bonavista when the windchill is -24c and the winds are from the North.

That's ... cold!
Maybe crank up the old CD burner for some extra heat. That's how this works, right?

[ChrisGreaves]

That's ... cold!

Au contraire, Cher Ami!

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The good news is it will have warmed up quite a bit by the time I set off for The Lions Club meeting at 7:45 this evening.
(at minus 18c I can take the scarf without the tassels on the end ...)
Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

... this has inspired me to add volume labels to them and index them more systematically.

You're welcome, Froggie. It is odd to think that you are influenced by a man (not me!) who was in his forties when he instituted a tape register in Newcastle NSW in 1970 and insisted - and spot- checked! - that every 2,400-foot reel had am adhesive label that matched the magnetic label in the first sixty feet or so of the tape.

Perhaps a separate instance of Everything, set up much as you have detailed, except not indexing my running computer, would be the way to go. I would only run this instance when I was updating the backups, etc. or when I wanted to inquire about files on the backups. My main Everything would be setup to delete offline drives, so I would not have to deal with transient removables.

I haven't got this far in my thinking, as I am still learning about Everything.
I don't like the idea of "separate instances" of anything, except that I don't mind having a batch/script job that performs a regular task each day; I can conceive a "maintenance" batch job that reports space-remaining on each online drive at the start of each day.

Right now I think that filters are the way to go.
A filter "WhatsOffline" that shows me every file on the system, then narrowed down by a search string; then a second filter to focus on a particular SET of offline drives; then narrowed down again to a specific drive brought online as the most likely candidate (for recovery etc)

In a week or two I ought to replace the 256GB SSD in one laptop with a much larger SSD; at that time the SSD that was the primary drive of the laptop will suddenly become an archive drive and be offline.

I am this day looking at my collection of cables for my zoo of USB drives and wondering whether the time has come to buy a slew of enclosures and one way or another mount every HDD/SSD/KEY into standard enclosures and invest in, say, five cables of the same gauge that fit every enclosure.

Then I can toss out the aluminum/steel/plastic drive cases and the long and short, black, grey, and cream cables of different lengths ...

Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

Maybe online: / !offline: or drive-type:, depending on what you want to show/hide ?

@NotNull @Froggie
Gentlemen, thank you for these thoughts. I am still trying to take Small Setps and not get too far ahead of myself.
Instituting "Volume Label" as a column was a milestone for me - well, OK, perhaps just a kilometre-stone - and the time spent physically rounding up removable media which had escaped from the "Memory Keys" box and the "External Drive boxes" (yes, two of those) was quite a job. My register of drives has, I think, four entries marked "missing" and three of the drives appear to be Rescue Media - more work for a rainy day.
Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

I have three unencrypted drives mapped to F: as Volumes. Now to add two more drives F: as decrypted partitions. I will make use of USB 01 and USB 02 – my nightly and my weekly backup drives. Will the results list be usable if fed into the Confirm Backups application? [1]

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I mount the drive as drive F:, although in daily use this is mounted as drive Y: I have an idea that I will be well-served if I use the drive letter “F” for all the drives I intend to catalogue as ofFline.

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Everything sees the drive F: but Everything displays no Volume Label – because there is no Volume Label to display?

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Correct. I load the six-character string “USB 01” into the text box for the volume label …

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Back in File Explorer Windows7 has detected the change in the volume label of this decrypted partition. Note that I have encrypted the entire HDD as a single partition.

Bingo!
I dismount the HDD so that the files are (1) offline and (2) encrypted and …

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… Everything can still list the files on the encrypted offline volume.

In theory I can now catalogue all my regular offline USB devices - HDD, SSD, and Memory keys and see what is on the drives even when the drives are stored in my accountant's office seven miles away (for example)

I am now thinking about my next trick, restricting my searches to (a) only drives that are online/hooked-up and (b) searching every bit of data that I own!
And for that I think I had better improve my knowledge of filters/macros/bookmarks/ ...

Cheers, Chris

[1] A separate application: "Congratulations. You are now backing up your data files nightly to an external backup drive, and accumulating that backup weekly to a second external drive. But how do you know that ALL of your data is backed up at the end of the day? And how do you know that ALL of your nightly backups have been backed up to your weekly backup? Only by using a separate procedure, truly separate from the backup application, can we be certain that all files are backed up."

[froggie]

Chris -
Continuing in the same direction, I labeled all my external backup drives as BACKxxxx and added them to the database following NotNull's comment, and then disconnected them.

I added the term !startwith:volumelabel:ba to my default filter (which is named Everything out of the box, but I created another one, Almost Everything and made it the default).

Now the offline backup drives do not show in my usual searches and I can switch to the Everything filter and a search argument of
startwith:volumelabel:ba to see my backups. (I think I will create another filter for this).

[ChrisGreaves]

I added the term !startwith:volumelabel:ba to my default filter (which is named Everything out of the box, but I created another one, Almost Everything and made it the default).

Froggie,thanks for the leg-up on filters. I feel that I need many general aspects of filters. For example, I find myself searching for a document on which I have worked in, say, the last month, so "past thirty days" comes into it, as does an overlapping "past year" and "specific year", and those are just three samples of date-time filters.
But first I ought to dive back into my original motes on filters and re-establish my secure knowledge. I'll let you know ...
Cheers, Chris