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How Can I Get Spotlight To Index a Network Drive (Airport Extreme)

Yesterday I bought an Airport Extreme. I attached a 1TB hard drive to it that’s formatted in HFS+. When I do a Spotlight search, Spotlight only shows me the files that are on my local hard drive and not on the network drive. How can I get Spotlight to index the network drive?
Thanks in advance,
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Tommy

Comments: 3 Responses to “How Can I Get Spotlight To Index a Network Drive (Airport Extreme)”

    12 years ago

    Spotlight is for indexing local drives only. You don't want Spotlight to maintain an index of a network drive as that would create a ton of network traffic as it constantly looks at and indexes that drive.
    So when you want to search for a file on that drive, just use the Finder and do a Finder search -- open a Finder window and look at that drive and then search for a file name that way. That should work, although I haven't tried it in a long time.

    Tommy
    12 years ago

    The Finder method works.

    Thanks Gary!

    Jays
    12 years ago

    Thought I'd add that the finder method stopped working on Lion for (at least some, at worst all) third party apple file protocol implementations... most notably the version of atalk that my QNAP NAS uses.

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