Coming from Windows

Searching a drive you have unplugged

Updated 2026-07-31 · 5 min read

You have three external drives and a file is on one of them. Finding out which normally means plugging in all three. It does not have to.

Why macOS cannot do it

Spotlight stores each volume's index on that volume, in a hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder. Unmount the disk and the index leaves with it. There is no central record of what was on drives you have disconnected.

Workaround 1: a text catalogue

Mount the drive once, write a listing, keep the listing:

find /Volumes/Archive -type f > ~/Documents/catalogue-archive.txt

Later, search the catalogue instead of the drive:

grep -i "invoice" ~/Documents/catalogue-archive.txt

Crude but effective, and it costs nothing. The obvious flaw: it is a snapshot, wrong the moment anything changes.

Workaround 2: a disk cataloguing app

There is a small category of apps built for exactly this — DiskCatalogMaker and similar. They scan a volume and keep a database you can browse offline. They work well and are the right answer if you manage a shelf of archive disks.

The cost is that cataloguing is a separate deliberate act, and a catalogue you forgot to update is a catalogue that lies.

Workaround 3: an index that remembers volumes

The structural fix is to keep a drive's records after it unmounts rather than discarding them, flag them unavailable, and keep them searchable.

That is how Everywhere handles it. Volumes are identified by UUID, so reconnecting re-attaches to the existing records instead of duplicating them. A file on a drive that is currently in a drawer still appears in results — dimmed, labelled with the volume name, so the answer to "which disk is it on?" is on screen without plugging anything in.

A note on Time Machine

Time Machine backups are excluded from ordinary search deliberately. To find an old version of a file, enter Time Machine itself and use the search box there, which searches the backup catalogue rather than the live index.

Common questions

Can Spotlight remember an external drive after ejecting it?

No. The index lives on the volume and is unavailable once it is unmounted.

Does a catalogue file work for network drives too?

Yes — find /Volumes/ShareName -type f produces the same kind of listing, though it can be slow over a network.