It goes without saying that in these times, everything that we have stored on a PC is of vital importance. And it is necessary to bear in mind that, whether they are for work or of a more personal nature, most of the contents of a computer are valuable to its owner in Windows.
That is why the storage units that we use every day, little by little, have been gaining more importance. It depends on these that we can store all our content and programs, in addition all this with maximum security and reliability. We already talked about programs as such, the files that we create with them, games , etc., all of them are software components that we would not like to lose.
How to protect data stored in Windows
Hence precisely the importance of creating backup copies periodically in order to be prevented from any possible disaster. This can be caused by an external attack, by misuse of Windows, or simply by a hardware failure. Keep in mind that to make things easier for us in this regard, Windows itself offers us its backup function. We can access it from Configuration / Update and Security / Backup.
But that is not all, but when talking about our content in Windows, we always try to organize it in the best way. For this we use certain data structures, folders and subfolders that help us in all this. Of course, even if we have all these files on our hard drives well organized, most of the time we keep getting lost. Although we have these personal files stored in duly marked folders, surely more than once we have wanted to look for a specific file and we have not found it.
How to open the Explorer finder in Windows
Do not worry, this is something of the most common that also happens to everyone. One of the main reasons for this is the increasing number of files we deal with. And it is that more and more elements of this type are being stored in disk drives, both internal and external.
It is for all this that from these same lines we are going to show you some ways to locate certain content in a faster way. To begin with, we will tell you that Windows has a file browser that is integrated into the File Explorer that you all know.
From it we have the possibility to easily search for any file, although despite this, sometimes we do not obtain the desired results. This is largely because we are actually referring to a simple search box. In it we do not have filters or any kind of tool that facilitates these searches that we are talking about. Of course, although at first this search engine may be somewhat basic, in reality it hides great potential. But of course, as usual, we must first know how we can take advantage of it and get the most out of it.
This is precisely what we are going to talk about in these same lines, so you can exploit all that potential with these simple tricks. Thus, the first thing we do is open the aforementioned File Explorer to access the search engine that we have talked about. For example, a simple method is using the Win + E key combination. Next, if we take a look at the upper right part of the window that appears, we find what we are looking for in this case.
Customize indexing to improve searches
This reads the Search in Windows message, so when we write something in it, the localization process begins. With this, what we want to tell you is that the Explorer itself will automatically look for the typed file. This is something that takes place on our connected drives at the time. For this, the operating system itself makes use of the content indexing table that it created at the time.
This is generated by the operating system to show us the desired results as quickly as possible. Say that this indexing to which we refer here, we can customize it from the Windows Settings application. Specifically, we will have to go to the Search / Searching section in Windows.
Well, when we enter a name in the commented section of the Explorer, as we say, the search begins. This is an effective method for general searches. However, in the event that we want to carry out more specific searches, we must resort to other more effective methods, as we will see.
Tricks to search for content from File Explorer
These tricks that we talked about at the beginning, can be carried out directly from the File Explorer. To begin, we will tell you that one of the tricks that we can use here is by means of the asterisk sign, that is, this *. It could be said that this element acts as a wildcard to replace any other character or set of them. For example, if we want to search for all files that start with soft, we will do a search with the term soft *. This is we write in the mentioned Explorer box.
This is something that we can also use to search for any file that contains the same text, in this case by typing * soft *. Likewise, the same sign will help us to filter the search for files by a specific extension. For example, we could use the term * .gif to locate all images of this type. But that’s not all, as we can also filter by file size . We achieve this through the Size command precisely. To give us an idea, we just have to type size: and select the size of the files. In the event that we want to find files larger than 700 megabytes, we can type Size:> 700MB.
Changing the third, we can also filter searches by the creation date of the content. To do this, simply type the word Date: in the search box. Therefore, as we can see, it works similar to the term Size that we have seen before. And even better, from the Explorer we can also do class searches, which is different than doing it by extensions as we saw before. So that we can see how it works, we can write Class: = image so that the system finds all the images , whatever their extension.
