Azure File Sync - Files Indexing

Question

We are using Azure File Sync to offload the files to an Azure Storage Account / File Share. That is all working fine.

Now some users are complaining they cannot search in file anymore. Looked at the fileserver, but the Windows Search Service is not installed.

Before installing the Windows Search Service to index the files I would like to know some more details.

• Are all files being indexed ? So not only the cached files on the server, but also the files on the Azure File Share?
• If all files are being indexed, are all files being retrieved, indexed and removed from the cache ?

Hope someone has the answers or some more experience with this specific case. Cannot find much info about indexing and Azure File Sync.

Answer 1

Hello Azure Test,

Greetings! Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform.

Azure File Sync doesn’t directly index files; it focuses on synchronization, but you can try exploring Azure AI Search which is a search-as-a-service cloud solution that offers a rich set of capabilities including ingestion, enrichment, and indexing of data. This can be another option to index and search your data within Azure Files.

Azure Files indexer is currently in public preview and there are some prerequisites to access this feature. By default, most files are indexed as a single search document in the index, including files with structured content, such as JSON or CSV, which are indexed as a single chunk of text.

A compound or embedded document (such as a ZIP archive, a Word document with embedded Outlook email containing attachments, or an .MSG file with attachments) is also indexed as a single document. For example, all images extracted from the attachments of an .MSG file will be returned in the normalized images field. If you have images, consider adding AI enrichment to get more search utility from that content. Textual content of a document is extracted into a string field named "content". You can also extract standard and user-defined metadata.

refer this doc - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-file-storage-integration for more detailed guidance.

The Windows Search Service is not directly related to Azure File Sync. If you install the Windows Search Service on your file server, it will index files locally on the server, but it won’t impact the synchronization process with Azure file shares, and this could potentially speed up file searches significantly. The search index created by Windows Search Service is separate from the synchronization cache managed by Azure File Sync.

Azure File Sync allows you to cache Azure file shares on an on-premises Windows Server or cloud VM. You can choose to directly mount Azure file shares (SMB) or cache them on-premises using Azure File Sync. When using Azure File Sync, your on-premises server acts as a quick cache for the Azure file share.

Hope this answer helps! Please let us know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further.

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