A very portable multi-system Everything on a USB stick

General discussion related to "Everything".
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NotNull
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Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

A very portable multi-system Everything on a USB stick

Post by NotNull »

What is this?

Everything on a USB stick (or similar) to index any system.
Per system it will create a unique database and INI file on the USB stick, so you can browse the files later.
2 scripts - STARTEVERYTHING.CMD and STOPEVERYTHING.CMD - take care of "everything"


How to Use?

[0] "Installation"
Create a folder on your USB-stick.
Place these files in that folder:
- STARTEVERYTHING.CMD
- STOPEVERYTHING.CMD
- BASE_INI.ini
- Everything.exe
(and Everything.lng if needed)

[1] Index a system.
Run STARTEVERYTHING.CMD.
Upon first usage on a system it will ask a few questions
- a description of that system (for example: Uncle John's laptop) to identify it later
- Whether all local harddisks should be indexed
- If network disks should be indexed too

After that, it will create a folder where the specific INI file and database for that system will be placed.

The second time you run Everyting on this system, it will automatically identify the right database to use and start it.
(So no further questions in that case)

Run STOPEVERYTHING.CMD before removing the USB-disk


[2] Browse a previously created database offline
In Explorer, drag/drop the folder (something like "1A2B-3C4D -- Uncle John's Laptop" ) to STARTEVERYTHING.CMD
A new separate instance of Everything will be started with the database in read-only mode. These can be identified by the titlebar: View-only instances have the foldername ("1A2B-3C4D -- Uncle John's Laptop") in it.
You can start as much View-only databases as you like. They all run side-by-side.


Some remarks
- Everything.exe will run under the current account, even if that is a restricted (non-administrator) account.
That means no NTFS Indexing, but Folder Indexing. A little slower, but the main goal was to create some sort of snapshot of systems.
- These scripts will change absolutely nothing on the systems that you use these. No filesystem changes, no registry changes.
- Keyboard shortcut for updating the index is Ctrl-F5
- Open the Everything search window with Ctrl-Shift-Z
- Don't forget to run STOPEVERYTHING.CMD before removing the USB-disk
Attachments
USB_Everything.zip
(3.63 KiB) Downloaded 614 times
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