Friday, 28th of August

Finding your Blend files

If you’re anything like me, your hard drive is not, shall we say, perfectly organised. Okay, I admit: My harddrive is pure chaos. Finding a Blend file from several years ago always takes me way too much time. But recently I’ve found some good ways to quickly find things, including files I’d completely forgotten about. I literally have thousands of (badly named) Blender files on several hard drives. And yet - I found exactly what I was looking for today. I found it easily. How, you might ask?

Here’s a couple of golden tips for finding your Blend files:

1) Use Void Tools “Everything”. A freeware, lightweight file browser app that beats Windows Explorer in speed. It's really super fast. Just download and install it, then search for *.blend and see all the results appear in seconds, rather than waiting forever like with Windows Explorer.

Download “Everything” here: https://www.voidtools.com/

One important detail: “Everything” works really fast with NTFS formatted drives. You can check what your drive is by right-clicking and checking its properties. It’ll either say NTFS or exFAT. If it’s exFAT, it might not see it. So how do you make sure “Everything” sees your exFAT drives and all the Blend files on it?

In Everything, go to Tools - Options - Folders and add the hard drives you want it to include in its searches. Click OK. This might take a little while then as it needs to index those, but only once. If you connect a different hard drive to your computer, you may have to click on “rescan” next to that hard drive (if it shares the same letter).

2) Another really handy tip: Make sure you can preview files in the explorer (and Everything) windows.

To do this, in Blender go to Preferences. Go to the System tab. Under the Operating System settings, it says “Make this installation your default Blender”. Click on “Make Default”. You’ll notice it says “File association registered” at the bottom of the UI. That is all, now you can see little thumbnail previews of your Blend files in any explorer window (Windows Explorer and Everything). Of course, you need to select “View Thumbnails” instead of “Details”.

Obviously, none of this would be necessary if I’d just properly named my files with the date of creation as well as many important key words in the file names. But, there’s something special about finding that one wrongly named, completely lost file from 2022. Anway, good luck finding your files!