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Spotlight has broken down completely

MacOS Mojave Version 10.14.6 MBP Ret, 13-in, Mid 2014, 3GHZ Intel Core i7, 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Irus 1536 MB - the spotlight index has completely broken down for some reason. Dragging the folder to Privacy tab and removing it again, does nothing. I have also tried to rebuild the Spotlight index from terminal using the zz folder technique. That does force the spotlight to reindex. After that, for a few days, the spotlight index seems to hold true and works - and then suddenly stops working again. I suspected an SSD issue so ran disk utility diagnostics which came back clean. I also reinstalled MacOS Mojave clean again. Still, the issue persists. The only thing I haven't done is a full erase and rebuild. I don't want to go nuclear like that just yet because I have huge amounts of data and personal setup on this machine that I'll need to rebuild. I'm afraid of doing a restore from Time Machine (TM) Backup after clean format and rebuild because that might bring the bad setup that has killed spotlight in the first place back. Cannot go too far back into TM because of the data I'll lose between that old working spotlight setup and now. In any case, it is a key part of MacOS and mustn't break down so completely like this!


For clarity, it brings back results from the internet and my internet history and so on but fails to search my files and folders locally. And no, these folders are not under privacy.

Posted on Sep 4, 2019 9:42 AM

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5 replies

Sep 4, 2019 4:04 PM in response to Old Toad

Thanks OT for your help. I found the fault. Eureka moment after days! While trying to rebuild the index using terminal command mdutil using option E (sudo mdutil -E /) , I remember I had mistyped it as option d once (sudo mdutil -d /). The command was executed straightaway. I ignored the output because that was not what I was trying to do and moved on...


Big mistake ignoring that output.


That typo disabled spotlight indexing for my drive entirely forever!


I thought the problem was elsewhere and have been tearing my hair out ever since.


I have now reversed that disabling of spotlight index by running the command -


sudo mdutil -i on /


The spotlight is back. It is still indexing but I think I have cracked the problem now.

Sep 4, 2019 1:34 PM in response to Old Toad

Thank you for the suggestions. I am working through them. Large files so may take a while.


I have run the Disk First aid using recovery volume. It was clean. There were some additional snapshots on my machine (1 - 7) and there were some errors on them but the final message was your disk is ok.


By the way, I'm surprised that when I check using - About this Mac - Software Update... menu I am being told my software is up-to-date:



Not sure why the two updates you suggest aren't being offered by the system automatically?

Sep 4, 2019 2:38 PM in response to himanpd

I should have use the term RE-APPLY. One can always reapply the latest system updater even if they are at that version already. Sometimes a system file will get damaged and reapplying the combo updater will clean up those types of anomalies. I always use the Combo updaters to apply any new update to my system. It includes all of the files in the various incremental updaters before.

Spotlight has broken down completely

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