Amazing, strange, and mystifying - SOLVED

[Timothy Miller]

>On 1/21/06 3:44 AM, "Sarah Reichelt" <sarah.reichelt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  On 1/20/06, Jim Ault <JimAultWins at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>  An update on 'spooky' Rev incident.
>>>  SOLVED  -- Rev is definitely NOT the culprit
>>>  My working version of a stack that had script-only changes is, indeed,
>>>  correctly saved to my hard drive.
>>>
>>>  The culprit is SPOTLIGHT, which is a Mac OSX feature new with 
>>>Tiger versions
>>>  (10.4+).  Here is why the insidious nature of Spotlight bit me.
>>>
>>  Thanks for sharing the solution with us, Jim. It's good to know Rev
>>  isn't suddenly eating scripts :-)
>>
>>  Sarah
>
>As our country's Ben Franklin once wrote:
>"Experience teaches a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
>
>For those not familiar with English, this means that fools only learn by
>making costly mistakes.  Since I have learned this way, I am passing it on
>:-)
>
>Jim Ault
>Las Vegas

Coincidentally, just this morning I found a wayward file I thought I 
had lost, or maybe never made in the first place. If I had not found 
it, I would have suffered some serious harm. When I finally found it, 
it seemed to be MIA because of... Spotlight! It was right where it 
belonged, all along, and in no mysterious place, either. It was in my 
documents folder, at the top level of the folder. Permissions were 
set correctly and repaired, and I even ran diskwarrior. Upgrading to 
10.4.4. didn't help, either. The file in question was not the only 
file in my documents folder that Spotlight was overlooking.

I logged onto an apple support forum, dedicated to discussion of 
Spotlight. Many dissatisfied and perplexed users are complaining 
there about Spotlight-blindness. It's often speculated that 
Spotlight's database can get corrupted. Ironically, DiskWarrior might 
corrupt it.

There's a shareware utility called Spotless that rebuilds Spotlight's 
database, I think, also, optionally, turns off find-by-content, which 
can fill up small or crowded hard disks and slow down slow machines.

Even better, there's a freeware app called EasyFind. It works pretty 
much the way command-F worked Macintosh OS before Spotlight came 
along -- but better. It's generally praised on the aforementioned 
peer support site. I tried it this morning. It looks good to me.

Cheers,


Tim