Post
by HarryStottle » Fri Mar 15, 2019 12:31 am
David, greetings
found this thread when looking for a solution to the same problem.
To any ET newbies, the very first thing to check when you cant find files you KNOW to be on your system - is that you haven't got "Enable Regex" ticked unless you actually intended to use it. Took me months to break out of that trap, and I have no idea why it kept enabling itself. I have used it perhaps twice in the 4 years I've been using ET.
nanycase: Your's is the single most useful utility ever produced for Windoze and I'm keen to assist your attempt to keep it that way, so any tests you need running, just say the word.
I frequently use ET for reasons other than simple searching. Ferinstance, uploading a file to, say, virustotal, you COULD navigate to wherever the suspect file is, if you have a clue where to find it, or you can simply use ET to display it, right click on the file, copy the full path and paste that into the Virustotal file explorer.
And I wanted to do that with a file I knew was buried deep in the /users nested structure. Couldn't find it. Randomly selected a few folders in that sub-structure, picked a few files and searched for them (using the F2-copy-paste method to ensure exact matching). Found most, but definitely not all.
So then I created a filter to isolate just c:\users and took a look at was was listed, while I was simultaneously browsing some of the folders with Xplorer2 on my 2nd monitor. Bear in mind that this is AFTER doing all the above, ensuring the disk is clean, indexes rebuilt etc. There were too many to count manually (but see below), but it looked like EVERY FOLDER was listed, but dozens, possibly hundreds of individual files weren't and the weirdest aspect was that in some of the folders, SOME of the files were visible to ET and some weren't. I even checked their attributes to see if the ET invisible ones were "hidden". They weren't.
As a trivial example, I have a folder:
C:\Users\Harry\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo\ which contains 15 items, most of which are links (extension .lnk). All are visible to ET except one called "Bluetooth device", which is real and active. The only obvious difference was that the Bluetooth device extension was capitalised and all the others were lower case. No ET filters or conditions were set which would justify that distinction.
So the problem is real. And it's not new. I've only come looking for a solution tonight because it's beginning to irritate me. My gut feeling is that is caused by windows permissions issues because I've only ever seen such obvious omissions with files on my system drive. I have 19 drives configured on my system, with a total of 30 Tb storage and a little under 9 million objects. (There is no way to manage that lot WITHOUT ET) and I've never failed to find a file I know to be on one of the other 18. My sanity depends on it! And I've had related issues with X2. Windows blocks access to certain folders - on the system drive - even though I'm an administrator. If I want to force the issue, I either have to switch to the admin account, or use the Winaero tweak to "Take Ownership" of the stubborn folders, but I don't like doing that. Windoze gets upset.
Finally, and even weirder, though possibly illustrating my guess re permissions:
I used the Explorer2 option to tell me the entire file and folder count under C:\Users
Result 4301 sub folders, 9599 files. (total objects 13,900, in case you run out of fingers)
Then I used ET and just typed in C:\Users
and it returned 30,976 objects, so it's clearly doing a pretty thorough job of cataloguing what's there, but, despite that, some files are very prominently missing!
So, what would you like me to try?
