I haven’t been here for a while, which is kind of an understatement. To be more accurate I haven’t been around here for “seems like you have died” is
closer to the truth. Well, the news of my demise were obviously exaggerated, which means that I am writing here now, yet it’s not going to be a regular thing.
What happened is that I got annoyed, so I decided to dust off my technical skills (a lot of dust) and take care of what annoyed me.
Lately, my main tool of trade is e-mail. As such, I use Outlook on Windows 8. As most people (or at least so I assume) I heavily rely on the
search abilities of Windows. Most of the time, everything is good, but once in a while something causes the system to recreate the index database.
This means that while the system re-indexes al my itms I can’t execute any searches accurately(again with the understatements). Now considering that
I have about 400K+ items, this might take a while effectively ruining my day…So I decided to do some research and try to understand if it’s possible to backup
the search database and restore it in such cases.
DISCLAIMER: This method is not endorsed or recommended by Microsoft (as far as I know). This might actually damage your computer and data.
This is something I found while personally exploring.
Use this at your own risk !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It turns out that the database is located under : ‘C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data’ . To backup this directory I did the following:
- Stop the ‘Windows Search’ service. Please note that you should move it to ‘Disabled’ or it will restart.
- Copy the directory to an alternate location.
- Start the service and move it back to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’.
To restore:
- Stop the ‘Windows Search’ service. Please note that you should move it to ‘Disabled’ or it will restart.
- Rename the current ‘Data’ directory to something else.
- Copy your backup to the original location.
- Start the service and move it back to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’.
What I found was that all of my searches continued working as nothing has happened. In other words, the service was restored
in seconds.
One caveat- when I started Outlook it kept saying that the results might be incomplete as indexing is in progress, but from what I saw
all the results were returned correctly. Eventually Outlook re-indexed all my items, but this didn’t stop me from working or searching
among my 400K+ items while it did so.