Network Drive Search?

Hi, newbie here. Been al around the web looking for an answer to this one...

I have a WD Network Drive, I can access it fine, it's there in the sidebar of Finder but I can't seem to search it for particular files etc. (I click on it, then click on 'shared' folder on the WD and type a file name in the search field, but when hitting return 'Searching This Mac' is displayed), any ideas please, I've pasted below some info that was on here from a long time ago by the looks of it but I need a more step by step explanation of the process, thanks in advance for any help with this issue, best wishes, Phil.


USE THE TERMINAL OPTION mdutil.
It has a switch, -i, to enable indexing on a volume. So I just went ahead as root (sudo bash) and ran:
sudo bash. (my network drive example is named "ldm" so replace ldm by your network drive name)
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -i on
Then I checked the status with
mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s
And, behold ... I got back the following:
/Volumes/ldm/:
Status: Indexing Enabled

A second later, the Spotlight Icon started pulsating. Half an hour later, it stopped. I went to a Finder window, typed a query, and selected the network volume ldm. To my delight, matches were coming back instantaneously on files deep down in the file hierarchy on that volume. I have not checked whether newly added files are indexed on the fly, too, and I do not know where the .Spotlight-V100 file is stored (not in the root of the volume in question it seems).

I thought that others may give it a try to confirm whether this is working as expected. The volume I tested this with was an AFP volume served via NETATALK (v. 2.0.2) by my Linux server (a x86 debian box). Unfortunately, it appears to fail with SAMBA. I have not checked NFS. One caveat: you must rerun the mdutil command each time the volume is mounted.

Hope it helps someone!

philbeckett said:

Hi, newbie here. Been al around the web looking for an answer to this one...

I have a WD Network Drive, I can access it fine, it's there in the sidebar of Finder but I can't seem to search it for particular files etc. (I click on it, then click on 'shared' folder on the WD and type a file name in the search field, but when hitting return 'Searching This Mac' is displayed), any ideas please, I've pasted below some info that was on here from a long time ago by the looks of it but I need a more step by step explanation of the process, thanks in advance for any help with this issue, best wishes, Phil.

Click to expand...

For the sake of clarity, here's a link to the actual posting of the tip the OP referenced:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...xing-network-drive-spotlight.html#post1152076

Rather than bothering with trying to force Spotlight to index a network drive, especially considering you have to re-do it each time it's mounted, try using EasyFind. It's a GREAT tool and superior to Spotlight in some ways.

Thanks

Just using it now, I'll let you know if it works for me, thanks again, Phil.

Network Drive Search

philbeckett said:

Hi, newbie here. Been al around the web looking for an answer to this one...

I have a WD Network Drive, I can access it fine, it's there in the sidebar of Finder but I can't seem to search it for particular files etc. (I click on it, then click on 'shared' folder on the WD and type a file name in the search field, but when hitting return 'Searching This Mac' is displayed), any ideas please, I've pasted below some info that was on here from a long time ago by the looks of it but I need a more step by step explanation of the process, thanks in advance for any help with this issue, best wishes, Phil.
...

Click to expand...

I tried EasyFind and it worked well, but very slowly with My Cloud.
I tried NeoFinder, it took 15 hours to catalogue around 200,000 files. From the software I could do keyword filename search, which opened almost instantly, and I could open any file on the list almost instantly, from My Cloud.
MacBook Air, OSX 10.11.3, WD My Cloud 4TB