Spotlight/Finder only searching "new" spotlight comments not old ones

I have a bunch of files on my external hard drive that I had taken several hours to "tag" with spotlight comments a few months back. I tagged them so I could quickly find them in Finder or Spotlight by different key words and not just file names or their contents (folders wouldn't work because the keywords overlapped many of the files. Plus folders are slow). It worked beautifully. Until I stopped adding tags for those 4 months until now.
I hadn't been using my comments at all in the past couple of months, but i had some files that I hadn't tagged so I decided to take the time to tag all the new ones. While testing to see if the comments worked, I noticed an extreme shortage of results, compared to the results i had for the same key words 4 months ago. I noticed that only the newly tagged files were showing up. I immediately checked the old files to see if the comments were still there and there they were. I restarted my MacBook Pro, thinking that maybe it was because I hadn't done so in the past few days. I noticed the little dot in the lens of they eyeglass and thought "oh boy! it'll reindex everything!" but it only indexed "new" files of course.
So my question is: "*How did this happen?*" But more importantly: "*+How can I fix it?+*"
I've thought that forcing spotlight to reindex my entire external hard drive would do the trick, but I cannot find any means to achieve that goal. Plus, I would rather just be able to index the files within one folder as I wouldn't have to wait an entire day of sluggish performance for that. Any ideas?

Let me start with the "easy" question first: the .DS_Store files are where "Finder information" is stored. Windows users find these things a pain in neck, and usually insist they be deleted. Most of time this isn't a problem, the Mac users just get annoyed when their folder doesn't open the way it was when last closed--the principle information stored there is the view the folder was told to keep, the size of the icons and their arrangement, and so on. Every time you open a folder a .DS_Store file created if one does not already exist, and if one does the file will be updated if you change your settings for the folder, for instance switch it to List view, tell it to always open in List view, with columns for Date Modified, Size, but not Kind or Date Created. And it also keeps the information entered in Spotlight Comments. Just how Finder preserves this information if a file is moved, in Mac OS, to another folder, I don't know. But it does.
What we REALLY need is a nice little program to write to the metadata of the file. For instance, Spotlight will index keywords, which are stored in the file itself, as part of the file's metadata. I mainly work with graphics, and Photoshop allows you to add keywords to the file's metadata. Apple's iPhoto and Aperture will also add keywords, but they are not written to a file's metadata until you export them. PDFs can also have keywords assigned, you can even do it with Preview. Text documents can also have keywords added using some (most?) text editors, including TextEdit (provided the file is in RTF format). The nice thing about keyword metadata is that it goes with the file, and be accessed in any OS that allows a metadata search.
Unfortunately I don't know of any program that would allow you to select a batch of miscellaneous files and add the same keyword to all of them. It would certainly be handy though.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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Spotlight comments not found - possible fix

I'm having problems with spotlight comments not being indexed on some files.
The tip from djhartman http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1215039&tstart=0 fixed this:-
To remove ALL ACLs from your homedir, use:
chmod -R -N ~
Thanks a lot. The missing files soon after running the command appeared in the smart folder. I migrated from Tiger to Leopard and I have had various issues which I've only recently discovered is due to changes in how Mac OS X now handles access. Hopefully this command has done the job.
I also had some folders and files which were either missing the staff group or had permission problems. I used the following commands to fix this. 755 gives the current user read, write and execute access and gives the group the current user belongs to (probably staff or admin) read and execute access and everyone gets read and execute access. I only used these commands in folders containing my documents not in my ~Library or anywhere else that contains system files.
How to change folders or files to default user, group and permissions
Open terminal:
for folders use
chmod -R 755 (drag and drop folder here) [press enter]
(-R switch = recursively applies to all sub-folders and sub-files)
for files use
chmod 755 (drag and drop file here) [press enter]

Running the password reset actually recreated the problem but that's ok because it helped lead me to the true cause and answer. Being a member of the wrong group can cause all sorts of annoying problems e.g. asking for authentication when deleting files, spotlight not indexing some files etc. Luckily this post http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200711291134001 had the answer. I'll sum it up here:
I had a problem with spotlight not indexing some files especially spotlight comments. I'd tried deleting spotlight-V100 to re-index and many other things which did not work when all along it was a group membership problem.
I had upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. The GUI tools in Leopard showed my primary group was staff and nothing looked wrong until I discovered the Unix commands thanks to your great script. I didn't run the script but it was very well commented so I knew what the commands did if I ran them in terminal.
dscl . read /Groups/staff
showed I wasn't in the group staff. (even though system preferences>accounts>advanced options said i was!)
sudo dscl . append /Groups/staff GroupMembership $USER
added me to group staff.
sudo chgrp -R staff $HOME
changes group ownership on all files in home to staff.
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /
repair disk permissions.
Reboot.

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Do this:
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Transfer your purchases the same way, choosing "transfer purchases" this time.
When you connect your phone for the first time, all media content will be erased. But you can restore your settings and app data from your manual backup afterwards.
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How to back up and restore:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414
How to download apps for free again:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519
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/var/cache/pacman/arch
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I guess you need to add -u flag.
Reading manpages is the highest virtue in GNU/Linux.

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Thanks, Sig.
The old computer is a 2.6 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
The new one is a 2.3 GHz intel core i7
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If you have any ideas as to why my menu bar and Text Edit type are still so slow, I'd love to have them.
(I went through the process you suggested earlier, re my Trackpad preferences, and found no improvement.)

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Restore from the backup!
You password: You have set it! It might be your passcode or you mioght have set it accidentally, so test all of the passwords you normally use. If you cannot get the password you backup is lost, but you can still sync your iTunes content.

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i just bought a new laptop because my old one died. is there any way to sync my phone with the new machine and not lose all my data?

Copy everything from your backup copy of your old computer to your new one.
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Spotlight/Finder only searching "new" spotlight comments not old ones

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