Spotlight & networked volumes...

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wnowak1

Registered
I've seen the demo how spotlight can find files on your disk very quickly, but does it apply to your mounted drives?

If I mount a network drive, will it automatically search that as well? I have lots of storage servers and it would be great to find anything quickly on the entire lan.
 
A very interesting question, considering that Tiger apparently does incremental indexing of the metadata in the background, not complete up-front indexing as the previous 'Index drives' feature has done.
That said, non-local drives pose a very real dilemma - Should you store a local metadata index for volumes that may or may not ever be connected to the machine again? This includes any and all mountable mediums, be they network drives (and which sorts do you index? Just HFS+? Windows volumes?) or removable volumes - Cd's? Flash cards? etc. You see where that road leads). Would it be a better solution to store the index on the volume itself, and only update it for changes? Would you burn the index along with the data on CD's (not a bad idea, actually). Just some points to ponder.
 
Purely speculation, but what if the index metadata was stored on the local boot drive? It could then be purged like a cache at certain intervals, say 72 hours or so -- that way, drives that will never be used again could be indexed for 3 days then be gone...
 
More pure speculation, but I hope the index is stored permanently on the remote drive. This way I can move my hard drives from computer to computer (which I do a lot) and not have to have the computer waste effort to reindex.

That is a very good question, though.

There was a cool application that I used to use a few years back called DiskTracker or something like that. It automatically created an index (if you wanted it to) of any mounted volume. Now it wasn't a metadata index, just a file name list, but it was very handy to search for files on unmounted (archived) media. Now given this whole remote volumes thing, conceivably Spotlight could do something similar if they wanted.
 
Yep, I remember that program -- as well as another one that I can't think of that we used. It actually integrated into System 7/8 so that doing a "Find" would search unmounted media as well. Pretty cool for pulling up old client's jobs off of 1.3GB MOs... back in the day they really taught you to name your media very well for that reason alone! You just had to deal with a few second delay when you inserted unindexed media for it to build a quick index of that disk. I remember there being a hotkey combination you could hold down when mounting media that would force it to skip the indexing procedure... damn, I wish I could remember the name!

Iomega had something similar to that which worked with Zip drives when they first came out, but IIRC, it only worked with Zip drives and Iomega-brand stuff.

I'm completely interested in Spotlight. I do a lot of UNIX work now, and being able to find files and folders without using the command line with indexing and Spotlight would be great.
 
But you'll also be able to use spotlight data in Terminal according to Apple. :) I guess the usability of Spotlight will only show itself once people are actually _using_ Tiger as their main system, which probably won't happen until there are a few newer builds out...
 
I'm looking forward to spotlight. When i saw the demo, I was really impressed.

It has to work w/ networked computers somewhow...what if you have the raid storage servers on your network... ?

time will tell.
 
Anyone with Tiger's newer builds had the chance of checking whether networked volumes are included in Spotlight? Is Spotlight slower when there are mounted volumes?
 
I haven't got around to mount AFP and/or SMB mounts, just FTP. However, I wouldn't believe FTP, which is still read only right now, would be indexed. At least: I didn't get results from the FTP-volume after a few minutes (which would probably have been too slow, either. Anyone actually working with Tiger and SMB or AFP shares mounted?
 
Thinking about it, I have a feeling that it would be logical to index mounted drive for the following reasons.

Apple sells SAN's and RAID solutions. Automatically mounted drives during boot, in my opinion, should be indexed.
 
Not to mention that in a corporate (or in my case, University) environment, very little data is stored locally, if any, so it's ridiculous if Spotlight can't search those volumes.

Perhaps it will work, but you'll have to manually index the folders/volumes you want searchable?
 
"Manually" and "Spotlight" don't go together. I'm sure the system will either 'decide for itself' or just do it if a volume is connected long enough/often enough. But like I said I couldn't check it right away now. :/ ... Gotta look deeper into this.
 
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