meiotic_Drive

After a bunch of experimentation, I think I am convinced that there are occasional issues with spotlight/Dropbox that seem to cause this weirdness. I am now seeing concordant results from Alfred and Spotlight (after manually deleting the entire index and rebuilding). It seems to me that the spotlight indexing either is slightly buggy with the Dropbox folder (which changes a lot) or it simply drops certain folders from its index if they are not frequently accessed.

I explicitly added Dropbox to my scope. And few of my main nested folders in Dropbox - and the search seems to work better. But spotlight just finds these folders, so it seems a bit odd to me that I need to add these nested folders to the Alfred scope to have them returned. The folders are not down the search - nothing is found and I a given the option to search google etc. I am reindexing Dropbox - but I do not think that is/was the problem, since Spotlight was able to find all the folders (before the reindex).

On another iMac I am able to show that Alfred performs as expected. So there seems to be something specific to my retina iMac macOS installation that is causing this behavior.

Thanks for the note. I am seeing if I can recreate this same behavior on other Macs that I use to try to narrow the possible causes. LaunchBar behaves as expected, but since it makes its own index (and seemingly does not use the Spotlight index), I do not think this is a meaningful comparison. The fact that Spotlight behaves as expected suggests that this could be an Alfred bug - but if it is, I should be able to replicate on another Mac. I will find out.

Hello, I have seen this problem noted before. I want Alfred to be able to search for folders within my Dropbox file. 1. My folders are in Dropbox at the standard location on my harddrive 2. I have rebuilt my index (running macOS Sierra) - spotlight finds the folders as top hits instantly. 3. I have a simple File Filter work flow to find files. 4. I have a carried out all the troubleshooting steps outlined in "Troubleshooting indexing issues" 5. I also deleted Alfred 2 preferences and files left in Application Support A. If the folder is outside of Dropbox, Alfred finds the folder instantly. B. If the folder is one that I have opened, then it is found. This is true even after reloading the Alfred cache (which seems odd to me? Could the resetting the Alfred cache not be working?) C. If the folder is one I have not opened in the finder but inside Dropbox, it is found by Spotlight, but not Alfred. Any suggestions how to troubleshoot? I am guessing that the Alfred cache is not being deleted - but I am not sure that explains the behavior. Thanks, Mike Z

Yes. And then I reinstalled the OS (so I know that I killed the old indexes). The indexing is now complete. I am attaching two screen shots that seem to exemplify what I am seeing. I am searching for a folder called: Service When I look in Spotlight - I see three copies (as there should be). When I search in Alfred - I see only one folder copy. Why is this different? I have a couple of screen shots I would be glad to send along.

Vero, So changing the folder name (as you suggest) makes the folder now visible - resolving the problem (although nested folders are still not found). This is clearly some sort of indexing issue with spotlight. Mike

So I deleted my spotlight index from the terminal and rebuilt the index overnight. I also cleared the Alfred cache, cleared knowledge, reset the search scope. And the behavior is basically the same - but I do not think this is an Alfred issue. So for example: 1. I have a folder on Dropbox at this path: /Users/mzwick/Dropbox/Work/Dean I see this folder in Alfred and Spotlight. 2. I have another folder of the same name, different path: /Users/mzwick/Documents/Dean I do not see this folder in either Alfred or Spotlight 3. I now use the Finder to open the folder in #2. Now when I search spotlight and use Alfred for 'Dean, the top two results are the files in 1 and 2. Both results are also shown in Spotlight. I really think this is some sort of Apple bug. It seems as though that portion of the index is not loaded. I can repeat this for a number of other folders. The behavior seems odd.

OK - I will troubleshoot this as I have time. The folder is sometimes in Dropbox, sometimes on my hard drive. Even in spotlight, I have noticed that it will not be found immediately but shows up in the search results eventually. The time delay is odd - which made me wonder about the fusion drive. Certainly once I go to the finder and open the folder - it now shows up immediately in search results. Perhaps there is an indexing problem at the base of this.

Hello, I have seen other threads about this topic, and I want to say up front I am not sure this is an Alfred bug. Here is the behavior: I have two folders named as "2015 Reviews". I have two copies of this folder - synchronized between my fusion drive iMac and in a dropbox folder (on the same machine). When I attempt to search for this folder, the result returned is virtually always the most recently accessed version of the folder. When I open and search spotlight, sometimes I see the same result, and somethings spotlight shows both folders as being present. I have reindexed the drive and do not believe there are issues with the spotlight index per se (or at least the behavior does not go away). So a couple of questions/hypotheses: 1. Do identically named folders (albeit with different paths) perform poorly with spotlight and/or Alfred? Are they not able to be indexed correctly? 2. I have a fusion drive - that is supposed to load files you use regularly into the SSD portion of the drive. Is it possible that only a portion of the spotlight index loads? This might explain the behavior I see (with the most recently access file always being found) thx, Mike