Spotlight not working on Big Sur?

didn't work for me

@Worfedia, thank you, that fix works for me as well. Now I can keep Time Machine on.

Yeah used Time Machine for several years now makes backup / recovery (especially of previous file versions) so much easier.

Sorry, that was directed towards Jim.

I don't use Time Machine, and never really have. It's perplexing indeed.

No problem :)

No problem and you’re welcome! And yeah the database indexing seems completed skewed. Spotlight was such a delight to use in Catalina. Be safe!

I have the same problem and it's really frustrating as I think spotlight is one of the fundamental functionalities of the OS.

It really sucks when it doesn't work.

No fix is working for me so far.

It didn't work but now after rebooting it seems to work again, maybe is the new year 2021!

Thanks a lot. The mdutil solution worked for me.

Big Sur really is a Big Screwup on Spotlight!

Just a restart worked for me

Thanks for the feedback.

This worked perfectly for me, and I definitely recommend trying this!

Thanks for this post, VERY helpful!

Thank you - worked for me too!

This has just happened to me right after a failed attempt to boot into my Bootcamp Windows 7 partition.

For more context, after the failed attempt to boot into W7, Mac OS booted up automatically. Mail app was frozen, I couldn't enter my password into System Preferences dialogue box. Tried to reboot but the computer was unresponsive so I forced it to shutdown by holding down the power button, and turning it back on. And then Spotlight was not working.

I somehow managed to get it working right now; here's what I did:

• Turned off Wi-Fi
• Ran First Aid on both the Macintosh HD, and the user partition in Disk Utility.
• Quit the 3rd party Western Digital Discovery app which I believe enables Finder extensions for my NAS drive
• Turned the Wi-Fi back on

And then it just started working normally. I have no clue what went wrong in the first place, but it is now working. Hope it helps.

--

MBP 15" mid-2014