Privacy and Security Enable or Disable Indexing File Contents on Specific Drive in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable allowing files on a drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties for all users in Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Search Indexing in Windows improves the speed and efficiency of searches by creating an index of files and their properties on your device. This index allows Windows to quickly locate and retrieve the information you need.

Indexing is the process of looking at files, email messages, and other content on your PC and cataloging their information, such as the words and metadata in them. When you search your PC after indexing, it looks at an index of terms to find results faster.

By default, all the properties of your files are indexed, including file names and full file paths. For files with text, their contents are indexed to allow you to search for words within the files.

Apps you install may also add their own information to the index to speed up searching. For example, Outlook adds all emails synced to your machine to the index by default and uses the index for searching within the app.

There are two options for how much of a file to index: either properties only, or properties and content. For properties only, indexing will not look at the contents of the file or make the contents searchable. You'll still be able to search by file name—just not file contents.

Choosing not to index the contents of files can reduce the size of the index, but it makes files harder to find in some cases.

You can select to enable or disable Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties for each drive with a NTFS or ReFS file system, and Apply changes to drive only or Apply changes to drive, subfolders and files.

Reference:

You must be signed in as an administrator to enable or disable allowing files on a drive to have contents indexed.

Here's How:

1 Open This PC in File Explorer (Win+E).

2 Right click on a drive you want to turn on/off indexing file contents on, and click/tap on Properties. (see screenshot below)


3 In the General tab, check (on - default) or uncheck (off) the Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties box for what you want, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below)


4 Select (dot) either Apply changes to drive <letter> or Apply changes to drive <letter>, subfolders and files (default) for what you want, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshots below)


5 If prompted, click/tap on Continue to approve. (see screenshot below)


6 If prompted with an Error Applying Attributes message, click/tap on Ignore All. (see screenshot below)

This error indicates that some files are currently in use, and cannot have the set content indexed attribute applied to them. This usually happens on the Windows drive (C:).

7 Your changes will now get applied and processed. (see screenshots below)



That's it,
Shawn Brink