Spotlight & Smart Folders Broken

[markgio76]

I need some help with a 2018 MacBook Air. 1.6 GHz Dual Core Intel i5. 8 GB RAM on Sonoma 14.4.1.

A few weeks ago Spotlight & Smart Folders tied to an External Drive started having issues. I noticed that recent files added to folders in the hard drive weren’t appearing in Smart Folders as they had before. Sometimes the Smart Folder is completely empty or only shows a fraction of the results from the Saved Search. Force quitting and restarting Finder would sometimes fix the issue, as well as rebooting the computer, but not always. Online research pointed me to using Spotlight privacy to add the hard drive & then remove it to begin a re-index. However, the issue would reappear, sometimes within minutes, hours, sometimes within days, but usually whenever I close the lid and put the computer to sleep for an extended period of time, my Smart Folder would either be incomplete, or totally empty again, and I would be forced to begin reindexing it all together.

It's a 1 TB Crucial X6 - ExFAT- SS external drive & reindexing takes at least 15-20 minutes, sometimes longer which is a pain when I’d like to access the Smart Folders right away. Accessing folders & files directly works fine, but using Spotlight/Smart Folders seems broken. I've also tried these commands via Terminal but they don’t fix the issue.

sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -i on /
sudo mdutil -E /
Reboot

I'm at the point now where I may just back everything up, reset the MacBook to factory status with whatever the latest MacOS is, re-add my files, reinstall any applications on an as needed basis, but before I do that, I thought I would seek help here first. Any help would be very appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

[Bigwaff]

t's a 1 TB Crucial X6 - ExFAT- SS external drive

If you don't need to share the drive with Windows, you should consider reformatting the drive APFS. ExFAT support on Mac is notoriously spotty and prone to file system corruption.

 

[markgio76]

If you don't need to share the drive with Windows, you should consider reformatting the drive APFS. ExFAT support on Mac is notoriously spotty and prone to file system corruption.

Ok thx. Is there a way for me to do that w/o losing all the data on the drive? Otherwise wouldn't my my best option be to buy some cloud storage, backup the contents of the drive to it then import back once the drive is re-formatted? Any other suggestions to do that?

 

[gilby101]

Is there a way for me to do that w/o losing all the data on the drive? Otherwise wouldn't my my best option be to buy some cloud storage, backup the contents of the drive to it then import back once the drive is re-formatted? Any other suggestions to do that?

How important is it for you keep file metadata? I am thinking dates, tags, etc. A copy to a cloud service is likely to lose much of that - but file data should be ok. Better to use a low cost USB disk (e.g. 1TB HDD) formatted APFS as the temporary storage.

Simplest to just wipe the SSD, erase and format APFS, and then recover from your backup (Time Machine or whatever you use for backup).

 

[markgio76]

How important is it for you keep file metadata? I am thinking dates, tags, etc. A copy to a cloud service is likely to lose much of that - but file data should be ok. Better to use a low cost USB disk (e.g. 1TB HDD) formatted APFS as the temporary storage.

Simplest to just wipe the SSD, erase and format APFS, and then recover from your backup (Time Machine or whatever you use for backup).

I'm not too concerned w/ metadata but it would be nice to keep it in tact. Is there a danger or disadvantage of using temp storage that's also ExFat or even FAT32 then import back to the APFS SSD once re-formatted? I have an old Toshiba HDD, spinning platters & all. Plugged it in & it still reads/writes, checked it w/ Disk Utility & it's formatted as FAT32. Could I use that to store the contents of the SSD while it's reformatted or does it need to also be APFS?

 

[gilby101]

I'm not too concerned w/ metadata but it would be nice to keep it in tact. Is there a danger or disadvantage of using temp storage that's also ExFat or even FAT32 then import back to the APFS SSD once re-formatted? I have an old Toshiba HDD, spinning platters & all. Plugged it in & it still reads/writes, checked it w/ Disk Utility & it's formatted as FAT32. Could I use that to store the contents of the SSD while it's reformatted or does it need to also be APFS?

Should be fine to use the exFAT HDD. I would reformat the Toshiba HDD as APFS, but that is not essential.

FAT32 has some limitations - like max 4 GB file. I am not sure how well this works with macOS as Disk Utility only offers to format as exFAT or MS-DOS (FAT). The web has contradictory statements about macOS use of FAT32 and MS-DOS (FAT). Apple says https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/disk-utility/dsku19ed921c/mac MS-DOS(FAT) is for drives up to 32GB which sounds like FAT, not FAT32.

 

[markgio76]

Thanks to those that commented some solutions. I reformatted the EX-hard drive & have not seen the issue reappear & it's been a few days. Fingers crossed that this is fixed for now. Side note - the MacBook was also frequently rebooting itself after being asleep for a long time (i.e. overnight, or for many hours) & when opening the lid, I'd hear the restart sound, see the Apple logo etc. then get the "Your PC restarted due to an error" phrasing. This too also stopped so hopefully whatever corruption was within the ExFAT drive has now solved both issues. When I have time I'll reformat my Toshiba External drive as well. Thx again!!!