The background process which performs indexing for Spotlight is named mdworker. Spotlight-V100 index folder is a good way of checking that Spotlight has built its indexes on any given volume, although if the contents of the volume are excluded from indexing, there might not be any indexes there, of course. So however Spotlight found my crafted text file, it wasn’t through its normal index system. Spotlight-V100 folder, and here doesn’t even contain any files or data. There is, though, a folder named com~apple~system~spotlight, but that doesn’t look like a. Look inside the Mobile Documents folder, and there is no folder containing metadata indexes. List any storage mounted in /Volumes using ls -la, and you’ll see the characteristic top-level folder on that volume which contains Spotlight’s indexes:ĭrwx- 5 hoakley staff - 170. ![]() One of the peculiarities of iCloud Drive is that it is not mounted in a regular Unix way, in the /Volumes folder, but in a special folder named Mobile Documents in your Home Library folder (~/Library/Mobile Documents). As this is a hidden folder, the best way to do this is in Terminal. If you ever want to check Spotlight’s function anywhere else, simply get it to hunt a similar needle in the haystack of your storage.Īnother way of telling whether Spotlight has indexed any particular volume is to look for its metadata index folder on that volume. This doesn’t prove that Spotlight also works on documents which are moved by macOS under the Optimized Storage scheme, but it demonstrates that it does index at least some files stored there. Sure enough, Spotlight found it in that document on my iCloud Drive. I left it for a couple of hours, then ran a Spotlight search on the word. I then moved that file to my iCloud Drive, ensuring that it was removed from local storage. So I created a TextEdit text file with a little text padding, and the magic word, the needle I’m going to place in iCloud’s haystack. ![]() My choice was prestidigitation, which I don’t use very often, especially when drunk. If you ever want to check whether Spotlight is working – or, for example, whether it is respecting a folder which you have excluded from indexing – the best thing to do is create a text document containing a word which is very unlikely to appear in any other file in your storage, local or cloud. So I thought that this might be worth re-examining more thoroughly. If that was the case, it would be a major blow to Apple’s Optimized Storage scheme in Sierra: when macOS decides to move your least-used documents to iCloud to free up local storage, it would also take them out of range of Spotlight. Since then, Tom Eriksen commented that, in his experience, that wasn’t the case, and that when files are moved to iCloud Drive, and removed from local storage, they are lost to Spotlight search. Last year, I wrote here that Spotlight search should work on files stored in iCloud Drive, under macOS Sierra, unless you make your iCloud Drive an excluded drive from Spotlight’s indexing.
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