Force Spotlight to properly index a FileVault folder

Nov 27, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ihint

With FileVault turned on and logged in as that user, Spotlight would not find all file matches in my search. I have two computers that hold sensitive medical information, so FileVault is a necessity if I want to use Macs.

Symptom: Files located in the Documents folder, or any other standard folder that should be getting indexed by Spotlight, are not found in a typical search. It doesn't seem to matter if you search for exact file names or for text inside the documents. I found the error with Word files, but upon further research, it also affected PDFs and GIF files, and probably others.

It seems to occur for files that were created prior to activating FileVault. Modifying files in some way will fix that particular file and allow Spotlight to index and find it. However, doing that to all your files may not make sense. In this case, you should reindex just your FileVault Home folder. Do not reindex the entire drive because this will not fix the error.

I reindexed my FileVault home folder by dragging the Home folder icon into the Privacy box of the Privacy tab of the Spotlight System Preferences panel. Once it shows up in the Privacy box, select it and hit the minus button to remove it. This will trigger the reindexing; once it finishes, Spotlight should have indexed all your files properly and return proper search results. This was tested on a Tiger and Leopard system suffering from the same error and it worked in both cases.

[robg adds: I don't use FileVault, but would be interested in knowing if others have seen this issue as well -- please comment.]

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071111175055549