What is your Windows.edb file size in Windows 10? Can it be moved b/w systems?

What should an average size be? What is it on your system?

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb

On my
Windows Vista: less than 1GB
Windows 7: less than 1GB
Windows 8: almost 3GB
Windows 10: almost 8 GB

Windows.edb is a database file of the Windows Search service... content indexing, etc.

If it's too big, you can fix that by going to Control Panel's Indexing Options > Advanced > Rebuild.
But it may take many (many) hours to rebuild....so overnight might be the best option.


If you have Windows 8 and Windows 10 installed on the same system, can you build the indexing file on Windows 10 and transfer it to Windows 8 or vice versa in order to save hours of indexing time?


EDIT:

c627627 said:

I have made progress on the thread's original topic.
It appear that when you go to Control Panel > Indexing Options
the number of items indexed is the most relevant piece of information when looking at your Windows .edb file size.

Someone at Microsoft forums posted his was 2GB on half a million items indexed.
Mine was almost 7GB on 1.7 million - so that correlates.

Defragmenting the index file however, is the most useful thing I learned from this as it saved me more than 2.5 GB of space as I posted in post#5 above...

Click to expand...

*bump*
Rebuilding the index overnight has resulted in Windows.edb file size being 5.5GB, with indexing still not finished.
Original size was over 7GB so not as big of a change at all as I expecetd.

What is the size of your Windows.edb file?
On my Windows 10 laptop it is only 0.6 GB. The same lcation:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\

Mine is 557MB

Here at work my, my Windows.edb file is small, 41,024 kb. Win 7 Pro.

This reduced mine down to 4 GB. It 's still too big I think.


How to offline defrag the index

Change the Windows Search service so that it does not automatically start. To do this, run the following command in cmd.exe:

Sc config wsearch start=disabled


Run the following command to stop the Windows Search service:

Net stop wsearch


Run the following command to perform offline compaction of the Windows.edb file:

esentutl.exe /d %AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb


Run the following command to change the Windows Search service to delayed start:

Sc config wsearch start=delayed-auto


Run the following command to start the service:

Net start wsearch

216 Mb here.

windows 10 x64, install has been running for about 5 months or so and mine is 192MB

OK thank you guys, I think it's clear that the normal size is supposed to be under 600 MB.

I wonder if having indexing off contributes to the bloated size of the indexing file?
I think it's interesting how there is a defragmenting command which reduced my file size from almost 7 GB to 4 GB.

168mb in Win8.1 Pro, but i have search/indexing/superfetch/prefetch turned off. It's one of the recommendations to extend SSD life to turn these off, added benefit ?

I have just been told that depending on the number of indexed items, the .edb file can grow large. So I looked and discovered that I have 1,700,000 items indexed.

Is a 4GB Windows.edb file too large or just right, to hold 1,700,000 items? That is the question now.




As for your question, I also have indexing turned off, but I turn it off AFTER I indexed 1,700,000 items, I don't want additional indexing activity simply because I feel that search time is good enough without additional indexing.

I have live search off but not regular search off.
I have indexing off *after* manually indexing the important files.
I would highly recommend against turning off superfetch/prefetch.

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Kenrou said:

168mb in Win8.1 Pro, but i have search/indexing/superfetch/prefetch turned off. It's one of the recommendations to extend SSD life to turn these off, added benefit ?

Click to expand...

If this was 5 years ago, I would be on board. But writes to an SSD are not an issue these days.

Case in point: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
(there are other tests just like this as well)

Re-enable SF/PF and don't worry about writes to your SSD.



(anyway, back to your regularly scheduled thread, )

also if you would like to move it as title suggests you can do a symbolic link and move it wherever youd like. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

Yeah I know, that would remove all HD space problems a multi GB file could cause on a small SSD.
Plus turning off superfetch/prefetch was never a good idea SSD or not.

As for indexing though, most multi TB drives nowadays are still mechanical, not SSD, depending on your computer usage, constant indexing activity does not yield befits for me after I finish manually indexing 1.7 million items, I turn it off, because constant mechanical drive additional indexing did not yield justifiable gains after I timed things with a stop watch...

I know im being a complete newb here but why would you index/search in the 1st place on a regular household desktop/laptop ? most people have everything on my docs or equivalent, and while it might save a few seconds of a search, how much do you search on a daily base anyway ?

Your point came up when I discovered just how broken the "new" post-Windows XP search engine really is.
(A lot of) people I asked were like, who cares, who searches their computer anyway?

I search my computer all the time. I do care about the search engine and I search my existing files quiet a bit actually. I have never used My Docs or the equivalent an any version of Windows ever.
I always store documents and files and music and everything else in their custom specific place that I choose to keep them in. People have their own "filing systems" where they absolutely store files in custom locations...


I do file searches and most importantly I do content searches too, when I try to find a specific scientific sentence that is contained in one of the thousands of my txt files.
Windows XP had this:




and then it had advanced options you can simply CHECK:




This is why gutting out the graphical user interface that Windows XP had was a horrible, terrible idea. But they went a step further and *broke* the search engine too. It has *not* been fixed in any version of Windows after Windows XP. It is unreliable to a point where if I don't find what I am looking for I have to either reboot into my Windows XP partition to do a real reliable search or use a third party search program on Windows 7/8/10 because the new search engine does not have a 100% accuracy rate. It works sometimes, it works most of the time, but certainly not all of the time...

I have made progress on the thread's original topic.
It appear that when you go to Control Panel > Indexing Options
the number of items indexed is the most relevant piece of information when looking at your Windows .edb file size.

Someone at Microsoft forums posted his was 2GB on half a million items indexed.
Mine was almost 7GB on 1.7 million - so that correlates.

Defragmenting the index file however, is the most useful thing I learned from this as it saved me more than 2.5 GB of space as I posted in post#5 above...