I am working on a number of manuscripts in Word using Windows 10. I have taken to storing older versions of these manuscripts in a particular folder labelled "Older Versions of Manuscript" to make sure I at least have a back-up copy if something goes wrong or I need to cross-reference with deleted sections of older drafts (and on external storage drives as well).
When I try to search for the latest draft of the manuscript using the searchbar, quite often it will give an older version of the manuscript and in several cases I have accidentally made corrections to older versions of the manuscript rather than the latest version. What I would like to do is deindex my "older versions of manuscripts" folder so the outdated versions of the manuscript do not appear in my search results, but I would still like to be able to search the contents of that folder specifically if I open the folder in File Explorer.
I tried hiding the folder using Indexing Options as suggested by this link, but when I opened my old manuscript folder specifically and tried to search within it it said there were no files at all. I am wondering if there is any way to deindex a folder from the system-wide search function (to keep old versions of the manuscript from popping up), but still allow the folder to be searched if a specific request is made (in case I need to find a deleted section in my old documents).