In the past, growing hard drives and ever faster Internet lines meant that the average Windows user accumulated more and more data. Quite a few users put files on the desktop “just for a moment” – and then leave them there for days or weeks. By no means all downloaded files migrate from the constantly growing download folder into correctly named and sorted folders. The chaos is perfect when the mountain of data is spread over several partitions and hard drives. If individual data is outsourced to USB sticks and other external data carriers, finding a file can take an eternity. Not so with these clever tools.
Program Name: Copernic Desktop Search
Desktop search engines such as Copernic Desktop Search help to search for files by allowing multiple search parameters and extensive sorting of hits. Of course, such desktop search engines are old hat for advanced PC users. If you want to find a specific file – whether image, video or Word document – particularly quickly, you can use the freeware Everything. The tiny program creates an index of the selected hard drives in the background and then finds the file it is looking for in a flash. The developers claim that Everything takes only one minute to collect 1 million files.
If you want to sort your files, but don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it and don’t want to use the Windows folder system, you can simply tag the data. These are small information appendages that are taken into account by the desktop search and, for example, reveal more about the image than the file name alone does.
If you tag your holiday pictures with the tags “Holiday”, “2014” and “Italy”, you will find them much faster using these search terms than using the cryptic “DSC_00004.jpg”.
One tool in our gallery deserves special attention: VVV. This stands for Virtual Volumes View and makes managing data scattered across multiple disks much easier. The tool saves the table of contents of all added disks, so that you can, for example, find a certain file even if the CD with this file is not in the drive. Instead, the program tells you on which CD the file you are looking for is located.