Search¶

To allow users to easily navigate across large backup datasets and select data for recovery and export in a fine-grained fashion, Afi provides full-text search across backup contents with rich capabilities for search query building and results filtering. Both per-backup search and global search across all backups in a tenant or a selected resource group are supported.

Unlike many legacy vendors, Afi search is implemented over encrypted per-backup index, with optional Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) support, ensuring maximum security and separation of sensitive data on a per-customer basis.

With Afi search and data access capabilities, you can solve a number of day-to-day problems related to data recovery and management, data change analysis, as well as e-discovery:

locate and recover items deleted on the data source (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, etc.) side;
review or export all available versions for a particular item as well as recover any selected version;
identify changes performed on the data source side during the specified time range;
analyze employee communication with advanced mail and chat data search capabilities, including time range, attachment, and sender/recipient search filters;
export data matching certain criteria and provide the resulting export to your team for further analysis.

Search features and capabilities¶

Afi offers comprehensive search capabilities for all supported workloads and provides filters and custom search options based on the specifics of a particular workload. You can find a general overview of Afi search and indexing mechanics in the following article, and the detailed summary of searchable data and properties for each workload is provided here.

Search features and capabilities supported by Afi include, but are not limited to:

Afi search is tightly integrated with the rest of the Afi platform, providing detailed audit history for each search query performed by the service administrators and users and ensuring search results compliance with email and chat content restrictions possibly imposed for specific administrator access groups.

Search modes¶

You can enter a query in the search box to search across all text fields, or use Filter to search specific fields. For more complex queries, Advanced lets you combine conditions with AND or OR and organize them into nested filter groups.

Basic search¶

To search by keyword, enter one or more words in the search box. Results must contain all the words, but they can appear in different fields. This example finds emails containing board:

To search a specific field, click Filter, select a field, choose an operator such as contains or equals, and enter a value. In basic search, an item must match every filter.

This example combines From and Subject to find emails from finance@demo.afi.ai with board in the subject:

Advanced search¶

To build more complex queries, turn on Advanced in the filter panel. You can combine conditions with AND and OR operators, and use NOT operators such as doesn't contain or doesn't equal to exclude matching items.

Filter groups let you use AND and OR operators in the same query. To create a group, click Add filter group, then use Add filter to add conditions. Within a group, the same operator applies to all its conditions and direct child groups. Each child group can use a different operator internally.

This example finds emails from finance@demo.afi.ai whose subject contains budget or forecast, but not draft:

Advanced search displays your search query in a formal query language below the filters. When you close the filter panel, the same query appears in the search bar. Parentheses mark filter groups, AND and OR define how conditions are combined, and NOT indicates conditions that must not match.

To edit the query, click it in the search bar and change the filters. The displayed query can't be edited directly.

Info

Advanced search is available for tenants added after May 6, 2023. For older tenants, contact Afi Support to enable it.