Your PC “knows” which files are on it via a search index, which collects the name and the contents of your PC’s files inside a small, dedicated database. But by default, only four locations are indexed: Documents, Pictures, Music, and any files stored on the desktop. What about the rest?
There’s no reason that Windows Search can’t index your entire PC. (Windows warns that this may affect battery life and CPU consumption, but the tradeoffs are probably minimal.) To do so, enter the Windows 11 Settings menu (Privacy & security > Searching Windows), click on “Find my files,” and the drop-down menu will expose either a “Classic” or “Enhanced” index mode. The latter will index your entire PC.
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Windows is pretty intelligent about how and when it indexes, so the process will take a while. A small tally in the upper right-hand corner will tick up and down as Windows finds new files, then indexes them. The same control menu allows you to essentially turn off indexing while on battery to save power. (Indexing can take several hours to compete when first run, but will turn briefly on and off as you make changes to your PC.) The same control panel also allows you to manually exclude certain folders, in case there are folders with confidential information you don’t want to surface, or for some other reason.
Note that Windows makes some intelligent decisions about what to store, even with “enhanced” mode turned on. The size of the index depends, of course, on what files are actually indexed; Microsoft’s support page explains that the index will be about a tenth the size or less of the total space those files take up. It will be a bit more if you’re indexing smaller files or computer code.
Selecting the “Advanced indexing options” inside the Searching Windows Settings panel reveals that some apps send files to the index by default: Outlook and OneNote, for example, index files by default to speed up searches. But there’s even another layer: this Control Panel app allows access to “Advanced” controls. Here, you can choose which file types are indexed, as well as how they’re indexed—either by the file name alone, or by the file name and the contents.
As for the latter, you’ll probably be just fine living with Windows’ default decisions. But you do have the option of making a specific file type searchable by its contents if that’s what you want.