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User Search Guide

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How to Login and Search for Documents

How Login and Search Results are managed by PowerScale Security on SMB Shares

Users and administrators must login with Active Directory user id, using DOMAIN\userid or user@domain.com syntax. The authentication request is proxied through the PowerScale to Active Directory to validate the password. The users AD groups are employed to identify all SMB shares that the user has read or write permission. This process of SMB share validation will be limited to PowerScale clusters that are have at least 1 indexed path.

NOTE: All Searches will filter results to return ONLY file or directories that fall at or below SMB shares the user has AD permissions to see based on PowerScale SMB security settings.

At the login screen enter Active Directory user id and password (NOTE: syntax requires upper case domain name DOMAIN\userid or userid@example.com)
Enter a basic search by entering key words into the search box.
Note: by default the key words will search file names, directory names and contents of files. (NOTE only folders that are configured for content indexing will return results based on the contents of the file).
You can copy and paste the location of a file in the search results using right click mouse action.
Then paste into Microsoft Explorer to open the file from the search results.
You can also download the search results into an Excel file or CSV file format. Click the cloud download button, select the file type download option and use "Download All" to get all files added to the report, or enter the number of rows to add to the results. NOTE: Limit on the browser download is 100 000 files from search results.
When done searching click logout button.

How to Recover old versions of Files With User Self Service File Recovery

If the administrator has enabled snapshot monitor mode , the file versions can be displayed and used to recover files protected by the storage device. This allows old versions of files to be recovered and simple copy and paste of the file location to open the file from Windows Explorer.

Steps to see file versions (if available)

Complete a search.
Right Click on any file in the search results to search for existing file versions in snapshots that protect and store multiple versions of a file. The Option shown below "Search for this file in backups".
The Search results will list all versions of that file that exist in the backups. You can see the age of the file in the last modified column. You can select a version of the file to restore to the file system by Right Clicking the file version to display the "Recover File" option. See Screenshot below:
Select the "Recover File" option to display information about when the file was backed up and where this file will be restored.
Select the "Recover" option to restore the file or "Cancel" to select another file version.
The restore progress is shown
The results of the restore operation is displayed with the following information and options:
1. Summary of the file name, backup date and location where the file will be restored.
2. Success of the recover operation .
3. A Copy to Clipboard option for the restored file, and file name that identifies the file name as igls-restored -date of the file version and original file name .
4. A Copy to Clipboard option for the original file name in the file system that was overwritten with the restored version.
5. A Copy to Clipboard option for the folder that contains the restored files.
If the file is not available in the backup snapshot location an error will be returned. See example below:
Copy to Clipboard a path to a file or folder to paste into Windows Explorer to open the file or folder. Click Close to return to the backup search results.
NOTE: The administrator has configured restore overwrite settings and protecting the original file during restore operations.

How to Use the Advanced Search Options

File title: only searches file names
Has the Words: A content search of words and phrases in supported document types for content indexing. Your administrator must enable content indexing first.
File Extension: the extension of the file example pdf . You can provide multiple extension types using a space character between extensions (Example: docx pdf). NOTE: The period or dot is not required.
File Owner: This is the owner of the files. NOTE: the domain must be entered upper case and the slash must be escaped as follows. AD01\\username (user id is case sensitive).
File Size: Min and Max range of file sizes.
Last Accessed, Last Modified, Created Date stamps on files:
1. default is anytime.
2. In the last hours , days, months , years (to search using a simple range based on today's date).
3. Older than hours, days, months , years (to search using a simple range based on a day in the passed from today's date) .
4. On a specific day.
5. Custom - this is a start day and time and an end day and time.
Cloud pool Status: If PowerScale cloud pools feature is in use, this allows locating and reporting on stubbed or archived files. The Default is return results for any type of file or change to search only the file system or archived data.
Type: This defaults to searching for files and folders names but you can specify folders only or files only to narrow your search results.

How to Use Dynamic Document Tagging

This feature uses content aware indexing to group and locate documents based on tags within documents.

Use Cases for this feature

Group project data based on project ID.
locate employee data by employee ID.
Allow users to tag documents with document ID's to locate with simply searches.
Create document ID's and leverage wild cards * ? to easily build file lists from multiple projects.
Classify documents for security with confidential, or other security classifiers.

Watch the video showing examples of how to use Dynamic project tags: