USN and .db

[harryray2]

Just a couple of general questions:

Is there any advantage to including the USN journal (whatever that is!) in recent changes?
How does the everything.db file work? It only seems to update every so often.

Tnanks

[void]

Is there any advantage to including the USN journal (whatever that is!) in recent changes?

Enabling Include USN Journal in recent changes will load the entire USN Journal into the recent changes list when Everything is started.
The USN Journal is a record of all file changes for about a week (varies greatly on file system usage).
You can search recent changes with the rc: search function.

Useful in Everything 1.3 if you use recent changes (searching with rc:)
In Everything 1.4 or later it's not very useful as date modified information is indexed for all files. (searching with dm:)

Loading the entire USN Journal can be expensive when starting Everything.
It is recommend that you leave this option disabled in Everything 1.4 or later.

How does the everything.db file work? It only seems to update every so often.

Everything keeps the entire Everything index in memory while Everything is running.
The Everything index is only saved to the Everything.db when you exit Everything.

[SuperDude]

@void: When you recommend that we disable the "Include USN Journal in recent changes," do you mean we should disable it for each volume that Everything indexes? Everything will still catch changes to monitored drives, yes? Does that option exist just for compatibility with older versions of Everything?

[void]

do you mean we should disable it for each volume that Everything indexes?

Yes, disable it for each volume.
It should be disabled by default.

Everything will still catch changes to monitored drives, yes?

Yes, Everything will continue to monitor changes as long as Monitor changes is checked.

The option for Include USN Journal in recent changes is to allow the user to efficiently find more recent changes when indexing date modified information is disabled. If indexing date modified information is enabled, there is little point to using recent changes.

Recent changes is slightly more efficient than indexing date modified information, however, the usefulness of indexing all date modified information out ways any performance loss or extra memory usage, both of which is negligible.