(The Hosting News) – Having all of a company’s data backed up on a serveris a fantastic way to ensure data safety and reliability. Similarly, having all of that data immediately accessible ensures that no productivity hours are lost waiting to view critical information—at least, ideally. Yet sometimes, even when the data a client needs is right in front of them, they are still unable to harness it. The problem results from inadequate search procedures.

“Often when a person is searching for a piece of datathat they need for a job, they theoretically know exactly what they’re looking for, at least to an extent,” says IT company Etech 7 CEO, Emil Isanov. “They know that they need an Excel spreadsheet, or perhaps a Word document, with certain data on it pertaining to a certain client, and in all likelihood they have a spread of likely dates that that data was filed. But even though they know all this information, they don’t necessarily have any way to inform the computer of this information, especially when they don’t know the exact range of dates or, more specifically, the file name. In many cases, the data may have been filed by another department in their agency, and although they can of course set up an automated search through all of their data, such a search can take almost an entire day, hog an entire machine’s resources, and not necessarily reveal the original piece of data that the searcher is looking for.”

However, the arduous process of searching can be alleviated, and perhaps even eliminated entirely, through indexing.

“Indexing, in brief, is a server management service,” Mr. Isanov says, “that runs an initial scan over the hard drive and builds a database file, often in a text form, cataloguing all the files on the drive by date, name, etc. All new data to the drive and all modifications made to existing data are of course catalogued automatically by the indexing software. But the result is that when a search is made for data, rather than searching through the data itself, the machine searches through the index, so that when a client searches for, say, ‘Excel spreadsheets made between June and July of last year’, the search is as fast as finding a specified word in a text document would be.”