Gigs of Unorganized Files

What do I do?

[danec]

I've just been promoted from Webmaster to IS Manager and now have the daunting task of developing some system for an almost full 126 gig hard drive dumping ground.

This hard drive has been the primary store for five years worth of assorted Adobe (PhotoShop, Illustrator, PageMaker), Microsft Office and other miscellaneous build files.

I need to allow continued access to this hard drive, but every day it is getting harder and harder for the users to find anything on it.

I've thought about using some kind of search engine -- or even the Google Appliance, but I don't think that it necessarily indexes all the differnet kinds of files I have to deal with.

Has anyone even taken on something like this? Any hints or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

[TheDave]

I dont know about its effectiveness for speeding up searches but it does make browsing for a file a lot quicker, so all our files are stored in directories of category and then years ie. process1\2003\file.fil, process2\2003\file.fil

If you wanted you could even go year\month, but I find it annoying myself having to go that extra step, especially when browsing (one of my colleagues started doing this which drove me crazy!)

Anyway, good luck, sounds daunting