The "Search" facility in Finder doesn't find files I know are on my Mac.
I just typed "7-minute" into the Search bar on Finder for "All My Files" looking for a document I'd saved a few months back and the result came up with no documents. I looked in my Documents folder and there was the document I was looking for, "7-minute workout". This has been happening a lot lately. I've also noticed this same anomaly in Mail, where I will search for a keyword that I am absolutely sure is in a email, and it will come up blank, or only find recent examples and not old ones (I have all my emails back to 1999: disk is cheap.) I'm on Mac OS 10.8.5.
The only thing I can think of is that I had the 256 GB hard disk on my early 2008 20-inch iMac replaced with SSD recently (professionally, but not by Apple.) It runs much faster, but did I give it Alzheimer's in the process?
(btw, I'm a 35-year tech vet, including 3 years with Apple, so don't worry about being technical in a response.)
If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -k Sender mdworker -o -k Sender mds | grep -v 'boxd\|Norm' | tail | open -ef
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.
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