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File searcher Mac

L

Luketerry

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 24, 2015
18
0
London, United Kingdom
Hello,

I'm after some advice...the people at my work currently use DocFetcher but that doesn't appear to work very well, as some people can find certain files then someone else can't find the exact same file at the same time...!

I under Spotlight is obviously on the machines, but apparently this doesn't search for certain file indexes, is there a way to broaden the finder index at all?

I am not too clued up the old Macs so would require as much assistance as possible.

Cheers guys & girls!
 
Luketerry said:
I'm after some advice...the people at my work currently use DocFetcher but that doesn't appear to work very well, as some people can find certain files then someone else can't find the exact same file at the same time...!

I under Spotlight is obviously on the machines, but apparently this doesn't search for certain file indexes, is there a way to broaden the finder index at all?
Click to expand...
If your drive is properly indexed, you can find all user files using Finder. If you add the criteria "System files - are included" it will expand the results farther. The only exception is that to search the Library folders, you must start the search within the Library folders. That shouldn't be a limitation under most circumstances, as your user files are not usually located in Library folders.

What kind of files are you trying to find?
 
The files that the users are searching for are all on shared drives stored on a server....DocFetcher did appear to work quite well because you could select the shared area and search within that quite easily.

I have updated the indexes on both machines within DocFetcher, just wondered if there was anything else which I could try.
 
Luketerry said:
The files that the users are searching for are all on shared drives stored on a server....DocFetcher did appear to work quite well because you could select the shared area and search within that quite easily.

I have updated the indexes on both machines within DocFetcher, just wondered if there was anything else which I could try.
Click to expand...
You should be able to do that with Finder quite easily. Just make sure the drive is indexed.
 
The details of the drive you wanna index matter. AFAIK Spotlight still requires that the network drive be mounted via AFP. So if you still have problems getting it indexed, check that.

Also, DocFetcher works by indexing a drive (like Spotlight does) and then searching the index. So if one hasn't indexed a drive, just as with Spotlight, it won't find what you're looking for.

Finally, applications like DocFetcher and NeoFinder are good if you need to search for stuff that's offline. So if you don't have access to that network drive or external, they can find what you're looking for anyway, show a preview (at least with NeoFinder, not so sure about DocFetcher) and tell you which drive to mount to get to it.

Finally, if you are searching the content of files, Spotlight needs to have an importer for some file types in order to get into the proprietary file and index the contents. Tons of common types are already included, like text and Apple stuff, but if you have some sort of proprietary file that might not be enough. Usually the application will install the appropriate importer. Not sure how DocFetcher handles this, but they have a list of compatible file types online.
 
I'm not quite sure what your question is but in my opinion the best application for finding files and folders is EasyFind (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11076/easyfind).

I rarely use Spotlight for search operations as it only finds what Apple thinks I should find and not necessarily what all is on my hard drive. EasyFind finds everything. It is not as fast as Spotlight as it does not use an index but that is a very minor disadvantage for me.
 
there is a free app called iFileX that I believe finds literally everything. no matter what settings you use, spotlight can't find as much as iFileX does.
 
Now I get it (and got it - DocFetcher). That is a great application for searching within files.

iFileX (for finding files) is basically like EasyFind which has a tad more possibilities and gets updated once in a while. EasyFind is also free.
 
Last edited:
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