After installing catalina i cant seem to index my external hard drive and a lot of stuff became unsearchable in spotlight and finder. I tried doing the privacy tab in system preferences method but it returns with the drive being a time machine drive and wont allow to add and remove the drive to force the indexing. Is there any other work around here that doesnt involve any formatting of sorts? thanks in advance
MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15
You shouldn't be using Finder to search a Time Machine drive. Also, since TM is a completely different file structure than on your hard drive searching with Spotlight won't work. First find the file in Finder, then launch Time Machine from your Dock or Applications folder and it should go to backups of that folder.
Jessivie wrote:
After installing catalina i cant seem to index my external hard drive and a lot of stuff became unsearchable in spotlight and finder. I tried doing the privacy tab in system preferences method but it returns with the drive being a time machine drive and wont allow to add and remove the drive to force the indexing. Is there any other work around here that doesnt involve any formatting of sorts? thanks in advance
Since upgrading to Catalina, Spotlight no… - Apple Community ...
So the drive is actually used as a Time machine backup drive and as a normal external drive. I also deselected the ext hd as the TM drive so why is it still saying that its TM backup folder. Is it because of it was set up as a TM drive and there is no solution but to format?
The hard drive is mostly used to store the work files since the laptop cant handle 2tb of data, the time machine was done to backup data when i installed catalina the other week never knew that this would happen..o well guess i have to partition this thing..will partitioning the HD wipe its data?
You can leave it the way it is. It doesn't matter to TM that you are storing other files, but it just won't index the volume. As far as a good backup strategy you should use separate drives to ensure redundancy if your TM disk fails.
Partition a physical disk in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
Is the drive partitioned or are both TM and other files on the same volume?
both are in the same volume,,never thought that this problem would be there in the future and just thought that it wouldnt change the formatting and would just add a folder for backup..
It would have been good to know this sooner before i had setup my time machine.. hahaha
TM likes to have it's on backup disk— if you have to partition, the TM should be the first partition on the disk.
This will help keep TM on track when it looks for its on backup.
3-2-1 Backup Strategy: three copies of your data, two different methods, and one offsite.
Boot clone https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10081
How to use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250
Use DiskUtility Restore feature https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/restore-a-disk-dskutl14062/mac
It's not an issue although you would be better off partitioning the drive for use with TM and other files. I'm not sure why you need to keep other files if you backup everything with TM? The idea of having a second backup isn't really a backup solution if it's on the same drive because if it fails you lose everything.
That said, I just think that the TM backup is why re-indexing isn't working.
Indexing external hard drives in Catalina
