How to find a 3D print file you have lost track of
You remember printing it. A small bracket, or a figure with a name you half recall. You know the file is somewhere on your computer, but you cannot say which folder, and a quick search of the file system finds nothing useful.
This happens to nearly everyone who prints regularly. Here is how to track the file down, and how to make it stop happening.
Start with what you remember
You rarely remember the exact file name. You remember pieces: part of the name, who designed it, roughly when you got it, or where you found it. Use those in turn.
- Part of the name. Search for a word you are fairly sure of, not the whole name. Names are often changed by the site you download from.
- The designer or pack. Folder names often hold this. Search for it as part of a folder path, not just a file name.
- When you got it. If you remember the month, sort by date and look through that period.
- Where you printed it from. Your slicer’s recent files or project folder can point to the original.
Look in the places people forget
The file may not be loose in a folder.
- Inside a zip or other archive. Model packs often stay zipped. A normal file search does not look inside them.
- On another drive. An external drive, a network share or an old USB stick that is not plugged in right now.
- In a different format. The model might be a 3MF project when you were searching for an STL.
Search without opening every folder
A normal file search checks names on whichever drive is connected, and it ignores what is inside archives. ModelHaus keeps an index of the folders you add, so it can search all of them at once. It reads 3MF, STL and STEP files, including those inside zip, rar, 7z, tar and tar.gz archives, and lets you look for part of a name or folder path, filter by file type, tag or source, and sort by when a file was added.
Folders on a network or removable drive stay in the library, greyed out, while the drive is offline. So if a search finds a file on a drive that is not plugged in, you know exactly which drive to connect, instead of wondering whether the file exists at all.
Once you have found a file, you can open it in your slicer from the right-click menu, or look at it in 3D first to make sure it is the right model.
Make the next search easy
- Tag the models you like with a few words, so they can be found by meaning and not only by name.
- Heart favorites and group project files into collections.
- Check the “added recently” view after a download session, and sort new files while you still remember what they are.
The guide on how to organize STL files goes through this in more detail, and managing a library across several drives covers the offline-drive case.
If you want to try this on your own library, you can download ModelHaus or look at the pricing.