Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Dropbox is not searchable in Mac OS Monterey 12.0.1
Dropbox files/folders are not searchable in spotlight on new MacBook Pro with M1 chip - Monterey OS 12.0.1. Have re-indexed spotlight. Have uninstalled and reinstalled Dropbox and rebooted. Have made...
I have found a solution, everyone! I hope everyone struggling with this will find this post. The problem isn't with dropbox, it's with Mac Spotlight. Which surprised me, as I always thought the finder search was separate from Spotlight, but apparently, on the back end, both are one-in-the-same. I've heard many times that re-indexing spotlight didn't work, but it does! You just have to do it a different way for everything to ACTUALLY 100% reindex.
Tutorial is here on apple's forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253479408
Just giving credit where credit is due.
In case that goes away, instructions are also listed below.
- Open System Preferences and go to Spotlight's Privacy tab.
- Add the entire hard disk INTO the Privacy list.
- Maybe wait 30s.
- Remove the hard disk FROM the Privacy list.
Spotlight will re-index. After finish re-indexing, the search in folder works for me.
(To see if Spotlight is indexing, use Command+Space to invoke Spotlight, and type in something. Wait a second. You should see a progress bar to show indexing progress)
Of note, I am on Mac OS Monterey 12.6 (21G115). My dropbox version is 158.4.4564. These are both the lastest, as of now, 10.3.2022.
Hopefully this helps! Changed my life - I can work again!
Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hannah! yes of course thrilled to provide you with the relevant data:
- Jay
Hi MazzolaMj, according to Dropbox desktop application, what is the current location of the Dropbox folder on your machine?
Jay thanks for your query.
The dropbox folder, although it appears on the Mac OS 12.6 sidebar at the top of the Favorites List, it does not appear to have a root.
- Megan
Hi MazzolaMj, sorry to jump in here!
If I were you, I'd try installing the latest stable version of our app, to see if this does the trick. Before you do, don't forget to turn Early releases off, from this link.
Out of curiosity, are the files you're searching for, synced locally, or online-only? What are their icons?
Hello Meghan, gosh really appreciating the input here, thanks.
I'm about to follow your most recent prescriptions.
In reply to your question about files syncing locally or online-only, I can tell you that almost all files are local sync, a small portion of others re online-only.
Ok.
Did the install, it apparently took the update, as there's no Beta badge on the File Menu icon dropdown now.
However, the lack of search is still present. I have attached two screenshots demonstrating the results of search:
As can bee seen in the attached images, a simple search on "obt" shows no results in Dropbox, but a bazillion in "This Mac", including files and folders in Dropbox as seen in the next SS:
In the Status Bar bottom of the Finder window we can see the Finder apps sees dropbox & it's contents.
How is it possible Finder cannot find anything inside Dropbox, when searching from inside Dropbox?
Thanks am s ever for your replies,
m
Having the same problem, but only in the folder that the most recent update of the dropbox back end created with my user name on it (business account). There's another folder inside my dropbox folder that is searchable using Mac spotlight search just fine. I have an open ticket with Dropbox support but as of yet they haven't had any solution.
I have found a solution, everyone! I hope everyone struggling with this will find this post. The problem isn't with dropbox, it's with Mac Spotlight. Which surprised me, as I always thought the finder search was separate from Spotlight, but apparently, on the back end, both are one-in-the-same. I've heard many times that re-indexing spotlight didn't work, but it does! You just have to do it a different way for everything to ACTUALLY 100% reindex.
Tutorial is here on apple's forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253479408
Just giving credit where credit is due.
In case that goes away, instructions are also listed below.
- Open System Preferences and go to Spotlight's Privacy tab.
- Add the entire hard disk INTO the Privacy list.
- Maybe wait 30s.
- Remove the hard disk FROM the Privacy list.
Spotlight will re-index. After finish re-indexing, the search in folder works for me.
(To see if Spotlight is indexing, use Command+Space to invoke Spotlight, and type in something. Wait a second. You should see a progress bar to show indexing progress)
Of note, I am on Mac OS Monterey 12.6 (21G115). My dropbox version is 158.4.4564. These are both the lastest, as of now, 10.3.2022.
Hopefully this helps! Changed my life - I can work again!
- Hannah
Hey davidarden, thanks for sharing this with us!
If everyone can try this and let us know if it worked for you, that'd be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Hi David. Did you try doing this with just the Dropbox folder first and that didn't work but when you did the entire drive it did? I haven't consciously done the whole drive, but I did re-index a big chunk of it, to no avail. But if the above is true, I can try again.
Thank you, @davidarden!!! It worked for me!!! I AM ELATED!!!
MarkBarLev Hi Mark. I tried pretty much everything in the book. The only thing that worked was reindexing the entire HDD, per the instructions in the Spotlight section of system preferences. Also, there were a few posts that spoke of using terminal commands to reindex. None of that worked for me. Good news is this is pretty simple and took about an hour to fully reindex everything, at least for me, and 100% fixed the problem.
JimmyDinh Nice!! Glad I could help.
- Great! Thanks. I’ll try it, especially since escalated Dropbox support takes days to get back to me and doesn’t have a solution.
It looks like your solution worked for me too. Thanks so much. It was so frustrating.
MarkBarLev Sweet - glad to hear it!
- Thank you so much, this has prevented me from buying a new windows laptop now!
Search hasn’t worked for months and nothing I could find could sort it out. Tried this and it’s working great now!
Was impossible to work efficiently before, having to have Dropbox open in a browser window to find out where files are and the LN manually opening them in finder!
Thanks again 👍 Worked like a charm
macOS Monterey 12.6 (21G115)
Dropbox v161.2.3938 (Beta)
Many Thanks
This worked... thank you so much!!! 🥳
- I use CleanMyMac to re-index spotlight with a press of a button & Alfred to replace spotlight search / just some tips 🙂 both are super useful apps in general
Glad to hear it!!
Awesome!
Hannah,
Been reading all of this. So far, I'm still on the old (and very functional) system. I am reading this with a lot of fear that things will not work. I guess my question is how did Dropbox do this and not test ahead of time that Spotlight would fail to work and put this out without a solution? It looks like users had to figure this out by themselves.
Doesn't Dropbox do user quality testing before releasing something? It seems like this should have been immediately obvious as soon as you tested it.
Comments? Thanks
it works! Thank you!
- Jay
Hi cinnil, this information can be found in this article, along with other changes to the new version of the Dropbox desktop application.
Hi Jay,
Thanks for the article, but I don't find it accurate as my finder was not able to find files or folders that were held offline inside of dropbox.
I was proposed another solution via dropbox support which worked actually.
Solution:
Click preferences in your dropbox mini icon and log out. This will remove all your synced files, but once you log back in it will be in the original location on macHD rather than the new location.
