revision control system or config mgmt but for data folders?
 

i am looking to implement something along the lines of a revision control system. or maybe it's called a configuration management system.
i basically have a single data volume, with all my data and work done over time. it is sort of organized based on folder names.
but the problem is when i want to look for something i did in the past, i have to browse a lot of folders and files and i can use windows search to look for files/folders sometimes but that success rate is around 50.
what i'm looking to do is make some sort of database and catalog all past and future data, and have some sort of interface or catalog that i can find past work done based on keywords... and for each folder having stuff in it there would be a readme file containing a summary of what was done.
I don't want to reinvent the wheel, is there something out there that will do what i want?
The catch is my environment is both microsoft windows and linux, and I want the search interface and summary popup for each data set found to run under windows. most of my data resides in linux as a samba share to windows, but not always.
I think all i want is a basic search feature on a data volume, but for a data set under a given folder have a readme text file going with that folder, such that when you do the search it also searches into each readme file for keywords. Then I or whoever else when they do or modify something would create or update the readme file with a description and keywords that goes with that data set.

I'm having trouble understanding the problem description.

If you want to track changes to "documents", look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

If you want to track changes to the filesystem, then one option is to do everything in a Docker container.