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Search features

The section below discusses the available search features and provides examples and use cases for their usage.

Building search queries

Building queries with filters

To search within a resource's backup, go to Service → Protection, find the resource, and click Recover to open its backup browse view.

You can enter a query in the search box to search across all text fields, or use filters to search specific fields. To add a search filter, click Filter next to the search box and choose a field. Each filter has a field, an operator such as contains or equals, and a value to search for.

The available fields depend on the workload and item type. For example, email filters include From, Subject, and Body, while file filters include Name, Extension, and Modified time.

Basic search returns items that match all filters. For more complex queries, turn on the Advanced mode where you can then combine filters with AND or OR and organize filters into groups.

Info

Advanced search mode is available for tenants added after May 6, 2023. To enable this feature for tenants onboarded in Afi before May 6, 2023, please contact the Afi Support.

The example below shows a query to find emails from finance@demo.afi.ai with board in the subject and at least one attachment:

AND, OR, and NOT operators

You can combine conditions in a search query with AND and OR operators, and use NOT operators like doesn't contain or doesn't equal to exclude matching items.

Operator What it does How to select it
AND Finds items that match all conditions in a group. Basic search uses AND automatically. In advanced search, set the group's button to AND (AND is default).
OR Finds items that match at least one condition in a group. Turn on Advanced and click the group's AND button to switch to OR. Click again to switch back.
NOT Excludes items that match a condition. Open the field's operator dropdown and choose doesn't contain or doesn't equal, depending on the field.

This basic search finds emails from finance@demo.afi.ai whose subject doesn't contain draft:

The advanced search below finds emails from either finance@demo.afi.ai or procurement@demo.afi.ai, excluding those with draft in the subject.

The field operators and AND/OR buttons control how filters are combined. Typing AND, OR, or NOT into a filter value doesn't apply these expressions.

Nested filter groups

Filter groups let you use AND and OR operators in the same query for complex nested search expressions. To create a group, click Add filter group, then use Add filter to add conditions.

Groups can be combined with AND or OR. Within a group, the same operator applies to all its conditions and direct child groups. Each child group can use a different operator internally. Groups can be nested up to two levels inside the main group and collapsed to make long queries easier to read.

This example finds emails from finance@demo.afi.ai with budget or forecast in the subject, but without draft. To build it:

  1. Add From contains finance@demo.afi.ai to the main AND group.
  2. Add a filter group with Subject contains budget and Subject contains forecast, then switch its button to OR.
  3. Add Subject doesn't contain draft to the main AND group.
  4. Review the search query and click Search.

Reviewing a query

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.

Here is the search query for the example above:

from ~ "finance@demo.afi.ai" AND (subject ~ "budget" OR subject ~ "forecast") AND NOT subject ~ "draft"

In the query, ~ means text matching and any means searching across all available text fields. Afi puts text values in quotes automatically. To search for an exact phrase, enter the phrase in quotes in the filter input itself.

To edit the query, click it in the search bar and change the filters. The displayed query can't be edited directly. Closing the filter panel applies your changes. To remove the query, click Clear all in the filter panel.

When you enter several words in one text filter, results must contain all of them. To find either word, use separate filters joined by OR. Search ignores capitalization.

Search suggestions

Afi shows live suggestions for search terms as you type based on the terms present in the backup index. For security reasons, live suggestions are not shown when content preview is disabled during backup browse.

Info

Live search suggestions are available for backups created after the 6th May 2023.

To find an exact word or phrase, enter it in double quotes. Words in a phrase must appear together in the same order, but other text can appear before or after them. This example finds items containing Northwind Acquisition Details:

To find words that start with certain letters, add * after those letters. This example uses north* to find files containing words such as northwind:

Date range filter

For certain data types, including mail, chats, and file data, Afi supports date range filtering for search results. For email data this filtering is performed based on email received date and for file data based on last modified date.

This example combines a search for Northwind with a Modified time filter for June 1–13, 2026:

Search by file category

For tenants created after Jul 5, 2026, Afi supports searching by file category (documents, photos, video, etc.) in file-based workloads (Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Azure Files).

You can select a category for filtering in the advanced search dialog and can combine it with other search fields, for example, for file name or date range matching.

Search by item size

For tenants created after Jul 5, 2026, Afi supports searching by size for files, emails, and chat messages. Afi indexes item size in MBs, rounding the size of each item down to a whole MB (this way a 3.5 MB file is indexed as a 3 MB file for search purposes).

For item size matching, you can specify lower and upper item-size boundaries in MB, either separately or together, and can combine it with other search fields, for example, for file name or date range matching.

Search in a selected snapshot

By default, search is performed across all backup snapshots and will locate all item versions matching the query, regardless of a backup snapshot selected in the backup browse context (see the Backup version control). You can limit search to look only for item versions visible in the specified backup snapshot by checking the Limit to current backup version option.

To export or recover several Salesforce records in one task, enable Limit to current backup version so that all selected records come from the same snapshot.

Export from search results

To export all items matching a search query, please click Download, then select the Download search results option and a format in which you want to export the data:

An important use case for an export from search results is to download all items which were created or modified during the specified period of time, even if some of these items are no longer present in the most recent backup snapshot. For example, this way you can export all emails inside a mailbox across all backup snapshots, even if some of these emails were deleted during the mailbox lifetime.

When you export drive or site data from search results, Afi will preserve file/folder hierarchy in the resulting export. If there are several versions of a file matching the search query, different versions of this file will be marked inside the export accordingly by their backup snapshot dates.

Search query audit

Backup search queries are audited and can be reviewed on the Activity → Audit tab. Each audit event contains query details and search filter parameters.