The SharePoint Search Indexes
A Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) can run two search services. One is the Windows SharePoint Services Search service (SPSearch) and the other is the Office SharePoint Server Search service (OSearch).
In the MOSS context, SPSearch indexes the SharePoint Help information while the OSearch crawls and indexes the portal content as well as any other content source that requires indexing such as a file share. As a result, in MOSS 2007 there could be two indexes depending on which services have been started.
In Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, the SPSearch service crawls and indexes the team site content.
Finding The Index Locations
Moving the index files is done by using STSADM. The location of the index files is typically in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Applications. However, you can find the exact location for the SPSearch service by excuting the following command:
stsadm -o spsearch -action list
and looking at the Index Location that is returned. More information on this command can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288507.aspx
The location of the OSearch index can be discovered by excuting the following command:
stsadm -o enumssp -title "THE NAME OF YOU SSP"
and looking at the Path attribute of the IndexServer Node in the resulting XML. More information on this command can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262077.aspx
In the next part of post we will cover how to actually move the indexes on both a single server installation and on in a server farm installation.
Go to Part 2