Spotlight over network?

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jms698jms698
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Hi,

I was wondering if Tiger's Spotlight indexes data in remote networked disks. I have an external hard drive connected to multiple computers via ethernet. It stores most of my data.



Will Spotlight find those files? Google Desktop Search on a PC of mine certainly does not.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,445member
    No this is a much harder task for Spotlight and any content indexing application. Apple has blurb on their 200+ feature page



    Spotlight Support for Network Homes

    Perform a Spotlight search on network-based Home directories in addition to searching local hard drives.



    But this still isn't indexing remote drives. I wonder if and how they will be able to accomplish indexing network drives in the future.
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  • Reply 2 of 7
    chrisgchrisg Posts: 239member
    I was hoping for a "Spotlight Service" on Tiger server that would do all the indexing on the server end and then the local spotlight to use the remote metadata store.



    Since Tiger stores all the index data on a per volume basis.
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  • Reply 3 of 7
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    Indexing remote drives is a really hard thing to do. I would imagine that Apple will first offer this as a service from MacOS X Server: the server will offer Spotlight a service so that the server will keep the indexes up-to-date and the clients will submit queries. This is a particularly nasty problem when you start to consider permissions. Spotlight handles this locally by having separate indexes for each user (of what that user can see in the target areas), this approach does not work well in a server environment.
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  • Reply 4 of 7
    dutch peardutch pear Posts: 588member
    Well, on my work PC Copernic Desktop Search searches network drives (in a windows-only network) effortlessly.
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  • Reply 5 of 7
    ginopiazza49ginopiazza49 Posts: 218member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by jms698

    Hi,

    I was wondering if Tiger's Spotlight indexes data in remote networked disks. I have an external hard drive connected to multiple computers via ethernet. It stores most of my data.



    Will Spotlight find those files? Google Desktop Search on a PC of mine certainly does not.



    Not sure if this is what you mean, however, you may want to look into the upcoming version 2.0 of iGet which will be released the same day as Tiger.
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  • Reply 6 of 7
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dutch pear

    Well, on my work PC Copernic Desktop Search searches network drives (in a windows-only network) effortlessly.



    But it does not automatically pickup all file changes and re-index the files right when they are created? (Answer: no, not for remote files) It also depends on a local catalog of all remote files, which means you have to effectively download every bit of every file that you are going to index on the remote drive to build that index.



    Starting to see why this is not really a simple problem? And why both Apple and Microsoft have pushed off the network aspect of their search systems to a future OS (in Microsoft's case they have said: post Longhorn...).
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  • Reply 7 of 7
    jms698jms698 Posts: 102member
    I found this post on enabling spotlight on a network drive:



    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50430233117572
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