Spotlight Not Searching Network Drives

[automan98]

I've read that Spotlight will not search network drives. This is a real disappointment since all of my day to day files are stored on another PC that acts as a file server. I'm not sure why they couldn't do this. I know it's not exactly the same, but Launchbar will still index file names for me even though it can't pull document meta data.

If I am wrong about this PLEASE correct me.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[grapes911]

I'm not sure if it can or can't. I have to say though, if it can I hope you can turn it off. I work in a computer lab at a college campus. We have 42 Macs in our lab plus an xserve. We see many other machines, both mac and pcs, on our local network. Many of these machine, including ours, are sharing files. Spotlight would cause our Macs to take a crap while indexing the network. Apple must have thought of this scenario while creating spotlight.

 

[cemorris]

I believe it will, but it will not be part of the spotlight database. This means it will be like a normal search and take some time. The local results will pop up first followed slowly by network drive results. The spotlight DB is updated on local file io only. Read the link below for a very enlightening review of spotlight. If I read correctly, that is what it says. Don't have Tiger yet so I cannot confirm

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars