The best free tools to find all data in 2023
An introduction to tools to help find specific files on your computer.
Are you looking for a specific file on your computer and cannot find it? The tools below will help you find it for free.
Growing hard drives and faster Internet connections are the reasons why Windows users accumulate more and more data. And the mountain of data is spread over several partitions and hard drives. If individual data is outsourced to USB sticks and other external data carriers, finding a file can take an eternity. The tools below offer help.
Desktop search engines such as Copernic Desktop Search help to search for files by allowing multiple search parameters and extensive sorting of hits. If you want to find a specific file - whether image, video or Word document - you can use the freeware Everything. The tiny program creates an index of the selected hard drives in the background and then finds the file it is looking for in a flash. The developers claim that Everything takes only one minute to collect 1 million files.
If you want to sort your files, but do not want to spend a lot of time doing it and do not want to use the Windows folder system, you can simply tag the data. These are small information appendages that are taken into account by the desktop search and, for example, reveal more about the image than the file name alone does. If you tag your holiday pictures with the tags Holiday, 2022 and Spain, you will find them much faster using these search terms than using the cryptic file names.
Virtual Volumes View (VVV) helps to manage data scattered across multiple disks much easier. The tool saves the table of contents of all added disks, so that you can, for example, find a certain file even if the CD with this file is not in the drive. The tool tells you on which CD the file you are looking for is located.
Copernic Desktop Search - Download
Copernic Desktop Search indexes, searches and displays files in all common formats - including e-mails and recently visited websites.
Info & Download: https://copernic-desktop-search.updatestar.com/
Everything
With the freeware tool Everything you can find files and folders on your computer in seconds.
Info & Download: https://everything.updatestar.com/
Exif Pilot
Exif Pilot shows you the Exif and Iptc data saved in your photos and gives you the option to change them using the Edit EXIF/IPTC button.
Info & Download: https://exif-pilot.updatestar.com/
MusicBrainz Picard
MusicBrainz Picard corrects and completes the ID-3 tags and copes with music files in the formats MP3, FLAC, OGG and WAV.
Info & Download: https://musicbrainz-picard.updatestar.com/
VVV (Virtual Volume View)
VVV reads the file structure of CDs/DVDs and other storage media and allows you to view and search them even when they are not connected.