Search network volume (Synology)

[JustRed]

I know I can't be the only one who would LOVE to use Alfred to find files on a network volume. 

 

Spotlight can't search my Synology device. Currently, my workaround is to open Finder, then type in the name of the file I'm looking for. The nerd in me says there has to be a way to use all-powerful Alfred. Could someone point me to the right post/thread, or work flow? 

 

Thanks so much in advance.

[deanishe]

Spotlight (and therefore Alfred) can search network volumes (like your Synology), it's just not turned on by default.
 
You have to do it via Terminal, but it's pretty simple to do. See here.

[JustRed]

Sounded great in theory - so I tried it. Maybe it worked for someone else, but failed in epic proportions for me. 

 

The Mac became totally unresponsive. I mean totally. Had to reboot. Now, for over 24 hours, it's stuck on indexing. Alfred hangs completely. I've added and removed items from the privacy tab, hoping to help Spotlight, but it's still sitting at Estimating Index time - and that's just for the 256GB SSD. I had to go in and add the entire HD to the privacy tab and remove it just so I could see all my documents in finder again. 

 

I have no idea how long it thinks it's going to run, but I'm now Googling solutions to fix this as now the network drive has unmounted and refuses to remount, indexing is stuck at calculating time, and the machine is dog slow. 

 

Might need to go back to CCC and Time Machine.

 

I really, really don't recommend this method. Lesson learned, I suppose? I was probably better off opening finder, tabbing, typing in what I want to search for and going with that. 

[rice.shawn]

It usually works out better than that, so there probably is some quirk with your system.

 

You can always check to see what processes are running and manually kill them in order to speed things up. Perhaps temporarily disable spotlight and fix what else is going on behind it (I always find it a bit fun when I completely break a computer or a server — albeit immensely frustrating).

 

Lastly, if you want to search through an unindexed drive, then you could always look for Dean's Fuzzy Folders workflow and adapt that to search for certain filetypes besides folders. He mention it would be slower, but it still is a solution. 

[deanishe]

Lastly, if you want to search through an unindexed drive, then you could always look for Dean's Fuzzy Folders workflow and adapt that to search for certain filetypes besides folders. He mention it would be slower, but it still is a solution.

Unfortunately not: it uses mdfind, aka Spotlight, for searching. Actually calling find on a large volume, especially a network volume, would be a good few orders of magnitude slower.

 

The reason Fuzzy Folders is so slow is that it calls mdfind/Spotlight with the last "word" of the query and filters backwards from there. It often ends up fully retrieving several thousand results from Spotlight, which it then filters according to your query.

 

FWIW, an index time of 24+ hours is pretty normal for a large drive, and longer for a network drive. Once the initial index is done, it's usually super fast.

Edited April 20, 2014 by deanishe