After a day away from my PC in Canberra yesterday, I came into the office this morning to find my PC unusually sluggish. A quick look at the Process Table in Windows XP showed that GoogleDesktopCrawl and GoogleDesktopIndex had obviously been hard at work during my absence. I’ve had Google Desktop Search installed for quite a few months now, so I was curious about this sudden activity. I jumped over to the GDS status page and was greeted by the following message:

Google Desktop Search has reached its maximum size. New items will no longer be indexed. You can still search for old items.


Argh!! A quick google search (how ironic) reveals that I’m not alone.

Google’s GDS Help Centre pages acknowledge the problem, but the only solution they offer is that " you may want to try re-indexing. You can do this by uninstalling and reinstalling Google Desktop". Not exactly satisfactory (I don’t really want to lose my 40,000+ pages of web browsing history).

It’s also not clear to me what the problem is. The Google Help Page referenced above mentions that "As you may know, your personal Google Desktop index requires no more than four gigabytes of space on your hard drive. In most cases, you shouldn’t run out of space for your Google Desktop index."

"In most cases"? Google also admits that "we are aware of a bug that may cause you to see this error message, and our Google Desktop engineering team is working to find a solution.". So I’m a bit puzzled as to whether I’m seeing a manifestation of this bug, or whether I am outside the bounds of "most cases".

I’m somewhat suspicious that this message has appeared so soon after my GDS index size has reached 500,000 items. For the benefit of other people who have hit this problem, my current index stats are as follows:

I’ve found speculation about that perhaps filesystem file size limits are the cause here (indirectly in this case, since it’s running on an NTFS filesystem, but the speculation is that Google may be working within the limits of the FAT filesystem capabilities to ensure maximum compatibility). Has anyone out there actually found a solution for this problem?