If you are using a Mac, you may have decided to be security conscious and store your documents in an encrypted sparse bundle.
This is a secure disk image that you create on your computer, and to simplify a great deal, you treat it like a drive and save documents and other files to it. You need a secret password to open it, and if someone gets a hold of your computer, they can’t get at your documents unless they know the password.
Some readers have run into problems whereby the contents of their sparse bundle is not being indexed by Spotlight. This is a problem if you want to be able to search the contents of your searchable PDF documents or tags, and is especially a problem if you use something like Yep that relies on Spotlight to find your files.
Awesome DocumentSnap reader Mark ran into this problem and worked with Ironic Software support to find the solution. He was kind enough to share it with me, so I am posting it here in case anyone else is running into it.
To fix it, you need to manually tell Spotlight to index your sparse bundle. It’ll take some Terminal-fu, but it is not too bad.
- Mount your sparse bundle
- Open Terminal either by going to Spotlight and typing Terminal or by navigating to /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
- In the Terminal window, type the following:
mdutil -i on, then a space, and then either type the path to your Sparse bundle or just drag and drop its icon into the Terminal Window. - Hit Enter and it should hopefully say Indexing Enabled
For example, here is what my Terminal window command looks like:
If you find that Spotlight isn’t finding the contents of your Encrypted Sparse bundle the way that you think it should, give this a try.
(Photo by oskay)
Related posts:
I seem to remember recently reading (don't remember where) a discussion about indexing Truecrypt encrypted volumes. The question arose, do you really *want* to do so? The potential problem is that even when the volume is un-mounted, the index can still be used to "peek" at encrypted files, which may be a significant security risk.