I have a Seagate drive formatted for NTFS. Since Spotlight cannot search NTFS drives, are there any utilities out there that do? I can mount and read the drive using Ventura on my M1 mini, but I need search capability.
If not, is there any reason why I shouldn't just backup the drive, erase it and reformat to a customary Mac-friendly format?
Mac mini (M1, 2020)
Have you tried the built-in Finder Search option when the drive is opened, at the top right corner of Finder?
Hmmm, that is very, very odd.
Perhaps the following tools may help you out.
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php
Hold Option or alt key when selecting Find to Find All.
Or Easy Find?
https://www.devontechnologies.com/support/download
Correct. NTFS is required by Windows only. not the drives themselves.
If you aren't planning on using the drive on Windows, there is absolutely no reason to have it formatted as NTFS.
Spotlight doesn't look in NTFS drives. But the Search option in Finder should work.
I tried it out, and it may take a while if its still indexing the drive, but it should find what you are looking for if its the name of a file or folder.
"Photos Backup" is formatted NTFS?
Were these photos backed up from a Windows computer?
Or is this a backup from the Photos application on the Mac?
Or is this a Network location on some other computer?
What exactly is in that drive?
Is Giraffe the name of a file like "Giraffe.jpg" or or is it a tag you appended to a file?
"Photos Backup" is a removeable 8 gig drive (Seagate 1XAAP3-500) and came formatted NTFS. I retrospect, I should have reformatted the drive when I first got it, had I known its limitations.
The photos were backed up from a Mac. They are mostly a combination of NEF, Photoshop, tiff, png and jpg files and mostly uploaded from an Nikon digital camera and/or processed from the NEF files.
The photos are not on a network or other computer.
The drive contains 23 folders, by year, of photos I have taken over the years.
"Giraffe" is part of the file name "Alex Giraffe.psd".
FWIW, I have used any number of common and unique search terms. No matter what I type or how long I wait, I get nothing.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Returning to my original question, I assume that I may safely copy my files onto another drive, erase and format the drive to a more friendly Mac format and replace the files, correct? That is, there is nothing about the drive that requires the NTFS format?
Yes. It just sits there. I've read other posts saying spotlight just doesn't work.
I searched for a file I know is in there, but after about a day, this is all I get.
Thanks very much. This has been a Mac household since 1986. I avoid Windows wherever possible! : )
If you purchase a drive in the future always check it's format and then use Disk Utility to formate it to one of these depending on the type of drive:
Are There Any Search Utilities for NTFS Drives?
