Spotlight Comments Disappear

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Spotlight Comments Disappear

I have several files which I tagged in the 'Spotlight Comments' section under 'get info'. I use this in conjunction with Leap. However the other day I tried searching for one of the files and only one of the tags remained under the comments section. I had not done anything different to these files and have successfully searched and tagged these same files many times in the past. Has anyone else experienced Spotlight comments corruption? I am running Leopard 10.5.4 and have not performed any updates since I initially tagged the files.

Is there anyway in the future to just backup the spotlight comments of several files without backing up the actual files?

Thanks
-IP20

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Oct 30, 2008 8:10 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 9, 2008 8:49 PM in response to intelpro

I have had something similar happen. But, the data still seems to be there. I can't find the solution either.

In Terminal.app, "mdls (FILE)" shows the comments in the kMDItemFinderComment field; and, Spotlight search still finds the files as well. Unfortunately, if you make any change to the comment block in Finder, the old data disappears and it is replaced with whatever you have typed.

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Answer 2

Dec 9, 2008 9:00 PM in response to Kent Neier1

And, now, for the solution.

In Terminal.app, run "*mdimport -n (FILENAME)*", and the data will reappear in the Finder window.

According to the manpage of mdimport, the " -n" flag doesn't do anything; but, whatever is not actually done, the net result is that Finder can see the comments.

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