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How can I make OSX index a network share for spotlight?

How can I make OSX index a network share for spotlight?


I am using a QNAP NAS with SMB network shares, which I mount with OS X Mavericks. They are not searchable, as far as I know because of the indexing of network share is by default not activated.


To force the OS to index them I activated this via mdutils. But this is no solutions. This makes spotlight to index the share once. But I want spotlight to index it always and keep it up to date. I have a huge amount of documents & fotographs, which is very difficult to manage without being searchable.


Unfortunately the only solution I found in the www was the mdutils-way, which seems not to work, maybe only works not for me.



I would appreciate any assistance,




Thank you,


Stefan

iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Jan 31, 2014 2:08 AM

Reply
29 replies

Nov 1, 2015 4:36 PM in response to Johann Beda

Johann is on the right track. As far as I am aware spotlight searching is only designed to work on AFP. If you're sharing from a Mac server, make sure you connect to the share using AFP and your spotlight searches should be fine. If you connect via SMB it won't. SMB doesn't enable all the extra metadata flow necessary for Spotlight to work.

Nov 26, 2015 7:44 AM in response to krot-krot

krot-krot wrote:


It works with AFP. I have the same share with SMB and AFP. Not works with SMB and works with AFP.

Unfortunately, in my situation (Mac OS X 10.10 running server, share point only being done through AFP) it does not seem to be working - spotlight searching does not find any files even if the file being searched for is right there in the directory being searched. These are just filename matches we are looking for too - none of this fancy "search within the document" stuff.


Maybe I should rebuild the Spotlight index on the server?

Nov 29, 2015 3:27 PM in response to jbosvark

I don't care if the searching is indexed or not. I just want to get accurate results for something as simple as searching for file names. Spotlight only appeared in Mac OS 10.4, but the Mac operating system and shared drives have been around much longer. How in the world did people manage to find anything before Spotlight?


For comparison, has anyone tried searching the same network share from a Windows system to see if Windows searching works any better? If Windows searching happens to work better, is Windows indexing that network share or not? If Windows is not indexing that network share but it is still returning more accurate results, then what the heck is the problem with Mac OS?

Jan 10, 2016 6:03 AM in response to stefanfromeuskirchen

https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/?lang=en

This solves a few other issues with Spotlight too, like parts of words. eg. "10111897543" type "8975" and Spotlight cannot find it, only "1011" etc.

I like this more than EasyFind. Hope someone likes it, I never paid originally and it was still very useable.


OS X 10.8.5 on Mac Pro 2009, & OS X 10.9.5 iMac 2010.

Feb 8, 2016 1:17 PM in response to stefanfromeuskirchen

My boss came to me with the same basic problem as outlined above; he could not find stuff with Spotlight buried in a raft of files he inherited from his predecessor that was stored on our Windows Server network share. Rather than try to load some type of indexing program on the Windows server, I tried a product from the App Store called Find Any File. It is slower than using Spotlight on a Mac, but the feature set allows some really tight search contraints to be created, and it can search the contents of files pretty well. It also has a nice feature that made it easier to drill down to the folders in question, in that you can use Finder to establish the directory or folder level where you want to look, then tell Find Any File to use what is in the Finder selection as the starting point and search subfolders under that. It did what he wanted.


It also works well on a Synology NAS on the same network.


OSX Yosemite 10.10.5 on my old Mac Mini; El Capitan on my boss's machine.

Nov 21, 2016 8:09 AM in response to garyleefromsaintpaul

I am an attorney and work with two other attorneys. They use Windows and I use Mac. Or did. Now that MacOS can no longer search the NAS for our work files, I have to stop using the Mac. As you know, time = money in the legal world, and we can't to have me wasting time trying to locate files that should be promptly accessible. They have no problems on the Windows side. But Mac seems to be dropping the ball and not really even caring.

Dec 7, 2016 12:53 AM in response to stefanfromeuskirchen

I have the same problem, every single day a take almost 1h open the folders to on external server just to index the name of the files for Finder find the files, but this is not solution.


If is possible to index the files what have indexed in a day before is a lot so better, fast and easy that need to wait to finder read the files from folders.

Dec 7, 2016 3:04 PM in response to ferreirex

I found a solution. I'm using Sierra. I changed my network connection to the external drive, where I have about 1.5 Tb of files, from SMB to AFP. Now, I can type a search term in the Finder from the main folder and within about 30 seconds, I get a search result for files matching my search term. This stopped working after Lion and before Sierra. I'm glad it's back (presuming that it's back and this isn't just a fluke).

How can I make OSX index a network share for spotlight?

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