Windows Can’t Find My OneDrive Files
Author: Bruce Berls – bruceb consulting
… Until this year, Windows Search could only search files on the hard drive. If you had files stored online that are not synced to the hard drive (which is now the OneDrive default), then you could do a search for a file by name in File Explorer, but you could not do a full text search – a search for words contained in the file…
… Microsoft has never acknowledged it – which is strange – but it appears that Microsoft’s quest for bigger and better searches caused it to completely rewrite Windows Search for Windows 10 version 1909, released in November 2019. It’s not going well…
… As near as I can tell, X1 Search obtains a full-text index from OneDrive when it’s first connected and stores it locally on your hard drive. I can use X1 Search to locate files when I’m offline. When you’re online, X1 Search gets file previews on the fly when you highlight a search result…
I found this article last August when I encountered the M365 eDiscovery search error I recently announced. It is out of date on a couple points, but it has been sitting in my News list because Bruce does a very good job of putting Microsoft Search evolution in context. It is unlikely that the eDiscovery service issue I found contributed to Bruce’s erratic search results. Microsoft’s monumental challenge of universal enterprise search combined with their rapid cloud dev cycles is likely the culprit. They know what needs to happen, but Microsoft is effectively performing rocket surgery while launching enterprises into the clouds. Too many moving parts. Too much data. Teams rapid adoption is complicating a complex situation. I have spent far too much time delving into Teams architecture from a forensic/discovery perspective. It will pose even greater challenges than OneDrive search.