I, in no way, recommend the following to ANYONE, but it gives you an idea of my state of mind BEFORE I even sit down at this machine these days:
Remember the hundred-some random-named-files I mention above? I lost it. I blew everyone (that the system would let me) away. macOS drew the line at around four-ish files, I no longer cared to count exactly.
Yes, it fixed it.
So far, the only consequence was a single reset preferences setting.
Spotlight, which I use to find a bunch of stuff easily, now finds nothing easily. What a mess. Yes, I reset the db and turned off stuff and turned on stuff. Still, I don’t understand why it behaves this way now?
For instance, I have a ton of lyrics and poetry in various versions in various places. I could search for Haiku and it would fine the files and folders with Haiku named or in it on my drives, and in the cloud. Now it doesn’t find anything. Apple says this is better?
In general, Tahoe-underpinnings- seem ok but it makes me do things through 2 or 3 more clicks than I used to do for a lot of stuff. - This has really messed with my workflow. I’m clearly not the only person with this issue. Is there no way to reset spotlight to find my files easily without extra keystrokes ?
I also cannot take a screenshot of thse bad spotlight searches, > oy vey emoji here <
I am back to the same problem with which I started the thread, which is exactly as you describe. I’ve done some resets according to advice here but still it is not indexing any of my content. Supposedly it looks at “Documents” which is a fixed folder, I do not put anything there except an alias to other folders where I really do have content.
This is really aggravating. Doesn’t Apple test these things? I will try one of the replacements mentioned above. I used Spotlight massively (as I see you did) before this OS. Too bad this behaviour was not in the warnings in Tidbits.
PostScript:
No, of course I didn’t actually get away with anything that heavy handed. I just didn’t notice right away that I had also blown away my Calendar (how, was not apparent).
So restored everything (including the original annoyance), and stubbornly started over. Resolved to pull a file, reboot, restore file, until I found the culprit. To narrow it down, I wonder, not extensions, etc., what could be, hmm, the old OS X nemesis, *.plists? Found it on the second *.plist I tried, “~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Spotlight.plist”
Deleted it, rebooted, the OS restored it sans “com.flexibits.fantastical2.mac”
Just a note- Spotlight now seems to be better although I wish there were better controls for displaying the results. I found the documents I was looking for (when it wasn’t working) after I had to invoke a database rebuild and then waited a couple days. I think the .1 update made me notice if not -create- this issue. I now get the window with the app/file/actions. There is a lot in Tahoe - concerning GUI - that I don’t like, however, when things start working again - I do like that. Carry on !
I think HoudahSpot is still available. As I understand it, it uses the Spotlight database, but provides a more advanced interface for making queries and presenting the results.
Today - Spotlight went back to not finding my files… what a travesty… I’m not going to start a routine where I reindex my drives just to find a bunch of lyrics I’m working on…
Again with Spotlight… it found files and folder on the disk for a while (as in the previos OS w/o problem) but then lost it. I have to reset as follows:
Complete reset and rebuild,
== disable indexing first with:
• sudo mdutil -a -i off
• sudo mdutil -a -E
== then re-enable with:
• sudo mdutil -a -i on
Now it’s busy re-indexing, let’s see how long the new index lasts until it again loses it.
Apple, Apple…. you are testing my faith. Was this not tested? I don’t have an exotic setup, just bog-standard.