Combine Dropbox And Locate32 For A PC Index You Can Access Anywhere

We’re big fans of Dropbox, obviously, and we covered Windows indexing tool Locate32 quite some time back. Lifehacker reader David Sidwell has put together a nifty guide to combining the two so you can access the index of a given PC from any other Dropbox-connected system.

Here’s David’s explanation in his own words:

There’s something that warms a tech right down to the bit level, and that’s discovering two of your favourite productivity tools actually can play nice together. I got to thinking it would be great to have the Locat32 index of files on one computer (say the Notebook) being available to be searched on another computer (the Desktop). Whilst locate32 supports remote shares, that introduces other concerns and issues.

So, after some experimenting, I found it was indeed possible to store the locate32 index database files on Dropbox. You must make a few small changes, all on the ‘other’ PC (effectively to mount the index as read-only). In the spirit of caring and sharing that is Lifehacker, I have documented my example with bonus screen-shots.

Hit David’s blog for the full explanation of how to rig this up — potentially very handy if you keep a lot of documents on a number of machines and want to track them down quickly. Thanks David!

Locate32 and Dropbox – offline indexes of remote PCs


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