The Network Crawl
The Windows Search Indexer is a background service that constantly scans your hard drives, logging the names and contents of your files so that when you hit the Windows key and type a search query, the results appear instantly. While this is great for local SSDs, it becomes a nightmare if you connect to a massive corporate Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive or a mapped server share. If Windows attempts to automatically index a network drive containing terabytes of data, it will aggressively pull all that data across your local network. This floods your Wi-Fi or ethernet bandwidth, significantly slows down the NAS for everyone else in the office, and forces your local CPU to run at 100% utilization as it tries to process millions of remote files.
How to Exclude Network Locations from the Indexer
By default, Windows is supposed to ignore network drives, but if you have explicitly added a network folder to a Windows “Library” (like your Documents or Pictures library), or if a third-party app forced the indexer to look there, you need to manually intervene and remove those network paths.
1. Click the Start button on your taskbar.
2. Type Indexing Options into the search bar and press Enter. This opens the classic Windows Indexing control panel.
3. In the Indexing Options window, click the Modify button at the bottom left. (You may need Administrator privileges).
4. A new “Indexed Locations” window will appear. The top half shows all available drives and folders; the bottom half shows the specific locations currently being indexed.
5. In the top half of the window, look for your mapped network drives (e.g., Z:\CorporateData) or specific network paths (e.g., \\ServerName\SharedFolder).
6. Uncheck the box next to any network drive or remote folder you see.
7. Click OK.
How to Rebuild the Index to Purge Remote Data
Unchecking the network drives stops Windows from scanning them in the future, but your computer’s local index database is still bloated with the gigabytes of network file data it already collected. To free up your local hard drive space, you must rebuild the index from scratch.
1. Back in the main Indexing Options window, click the Advanced button.
2. Under the “Troubleshooting” section, look for the “Delete and rebuild index” option.
3. Click the Rebuild button.
4. A warning will appear telling you that rebuilding the index might take a long time and search results will be incomplete until it finishes. Click OK.
Windows will delete its massive database and start fresh, scanning only your fast, local C: drive and leaving your network bandwidth completely alone.