A system and method for indexing user data on storage systems is provided. A client of the storage system executes a novel client side agent that is configured to detect changes to data stored by the client on the storage system. In response to detecting that data has been modified, the agent examines modified data containers and parses the modified data to identify new and/or modified index terms or the creation/deletion of data containers. Once the data has been parsed by the agent to identify new/modified index terms, the parsed data is transmitted from the agent to a management module executing on a management server. The management module receives the parsed data and updates a search database using the received parsed data.