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Spotlight Failure

Spotlight randomly fails to find items that are right there in front of it, totalling a minor but sizeable proportion of my files. Even if I copy and paste the exact name of a file that Spotlight doesn’t like, then search within the exact folder where that file resides, it will still return zero results. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that sometimes if one of the files it doesn’t like has two words in its name, such as “Blue Car”, a search for “Blue” might yield results as will a search for “Car”, but if I search “Blue Car” it fails.

This has been a problem since the beginning, on OS X 10.4 Tiger, but has become considerably worse since 10.9 Mavericks through 10.12 Sierra. Over the years, I have tried reindexing, countless times, through System Prefs, Finder and Terminal commands. I’ve tried Dozens of System installs, clean or otherwise. PRAM Zaps and SMC resets make no difference, nor does buying a new computer. These “solutions” tend to result in fixing some items only to replace them with a new set of un-indexed fails.

I never store my data on the startup disk (which I believe might be relevant). I currently use a Mac OS Extended Journaled two-disk RAID set, attached via Thunderbolt 2. I also wonder/hope that High Sierra’s new file system might be more Spotlight friendly, which for the first time in a long time would be a “new feature” that I could actually use to get some work done.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Spotlight not working          see post by Linc Davis and other suggestions.

Thank you. I’ve tried this before, and I just tested it again. It helps, in that some previously unsearchable files are now found, but others are still missing, and from experience that will include newly unsearchable files too.

Update: And now, a few minutes on, even those re-discovered files are now, again, missing form searches

And now, a few minutes on, even those re-discovered files are now missing form Spotlight searches.

I suggest you use the program created by Etresoft, a frequent contributor.  It will provide a snapshot of your system which we can analyze to possibly determine the cause of your problem. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read. On the screen with Options, please open Options and check the bottom 2 boxes before running. Click “Share Report” button in the toolbar, select “Copy to Clipboard” and then paste into a reply. This will show what is running on your computer. No personal information is shown.

Etrecheck – System Information

最后更新：2017-09-13 02:33:00

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