Exclude offline drive from searching while keeping in database

[runmode]

Hi,
I have indexed my old computer's NTFS drive for occasional reference. It is listed under Options / Indexes / NTFS / Local NTFS volumes. My question is, how to exclude this drive "globally" from search results without loosing the data. Ideally it would not take RAM space and could be made available only when I need it at rare occations. My problem is that the options offered are not self explaining from the semantics of the words and I didn't find any forum posts clearly explaining - so I am asking...

Options are offered in the UI for a highlighted drive:
"Remove" button
"Include in database" checkmark

What exactly happens when I switch these options?

Can I savely uncheck "Include in database" or will the information about the offline drive get removed from the database and get lost? Note, it will be impossible to rescan the old drive because it was wiped.

Thoughts about the UI guidance:
The location of "Include in database" checkmark under "Settings" could let me hope but does not make it clear. What makes me really uncertain is that the "Include only" dialogue (I guess it allows to choose a folder tree or a pattern to match?) is not aware of the offline drive but prompts for a online drive. And what should be the purpose of the remove button other than to "dis-include" the drive from the database, which is the same as not "Include in the database" ? I assume "database" is different from "index", in the sense that an index is a fast reference to data in a database.

[NotNull]

As this is static data, using an EFU file list seems the most logical solution to this:

• In Everything, search for the drive that is no longer online, in this example drive X:
• Export the results to an EFU File List:
  • Menu => File => Export
  • Save as type: EFU Everything File List (*.efu)
  • Save somewhere on your disk
• Back in Everything's main window: Menu => File => Open File List
• Browse to the EFU file you previously saved and open it
• Check if all results of this disk (X:) are available.
• If all is OK: Menu => File => Close File List
• Now drive X: can be removed from the index, but to be certain it is better to make a backup of the Everything database first:
  • In Explorer, type or paste the following in the address bar and press ENTER

    Code: Select all

    %appdata%\Everything

  • Copy Everything.db to a save location
• To remove "drive X:" from the Everything index:
  • Menu => Tools => Options => Indexes => NTFS
  • In the Local NTFS volumes list, select drive X:
  • Uncheck Include in database
  • Press the OK button
    Drive X: and the files/folders in it will be removed from the Everything database.
• Save the created EFU file and the backup Everything.db in a save place as they contain the information of drive X that is no longer available elsewhere.

In case you need to search for files folders from your drive X:

• Menu => File => Open File List
• Browse to the EFU file you previously saved and open it
• Executue your normal searches
• When done, close the file list and return to your regular Everything (Menu => File => Close File List)

[runmode]

This is a great guidance, thank you!

This is how I proceeded, following your advise (for anyone who should search for it):

I first made a backup of Everything-1.5a.db which was located in C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Everything, in my installation. It it proved to be wise also to have a backup of Everything-1.5a.ini.

Then I had to clear a drive letter conflict between my current drive D: and my old computer's drive D: (the offline drive in question), which is precondition to get the old drive search results isolated from the current drive. My first approach was to change the "Mount path in the Everything index" of the old drive, but this way I lost connection to the index and had to restore the ini file (actually the entire folder) from my regular backup. The better way was to unckeck 'Include in database' for the current drive D: so only the old drive D remained in the search results.

Then I searched for D: and saved the results to an EFU Everything File List (*.efu).

After verifying the EFU file works well, I unchecked 'Include in the database' for the old drive, and that applied, I pressed the 'Remove' button to remove the reference from the list of local NTFS volumes.

Finally I Included the current drive D: in the database again.

This way I got the external drive's data transferred to an EFU file - and "Everything is pretty lean and nice", once again!

Thank you