[chinesebear]

Ok, so from Panther I had my home directory encrypted with File Vault. Now, i've upgraded to Tiger (about 3 weeks ago) and was just trying to search for something in my home directory...and Spotlight can't seem to find anything in it. Does File Vault effectively make spotlight useless for me? if it does, do i have any other encryption options (I want 128 bit encryption on my hard drive)?

OK, after doing a bit more searching on the apple website, spotlight is supposed to index my home directory whether it was FileVaulted or not. So what i did was typed in the name of a Word file that i created about 6 hours ago. no dice. tried anything else in my home directory (from the file names)...no dice. I'm on a 12" G4 powerbook (latest generation) with 768 MB of Ram and loads of free HD space. I've got multiple user accounts on my machine...would this make a difference?

[jsk173]

If you're searching for one of your own docs, multiple users probably wouldn't be the culprit. Did you de-select your documents folder in the Spotlight prefs and/or add it to the Privacy list? Spotlight can be told to ignore entire areas/aspects of your HD.

[chinesebear]

I went through and checked that...I've got absolutely nothing in my privacy list. Perhaps it just didn't index the files initially becuase they were encrypted? Is there a way to force spotlight to re-index my Home directory?

[jsk173]

I suppose there might be a Terminal command to force a re-index but I'm not sure. I've heard Spotlight can take a long time to index after the first Tiger restart; perhaps you shut down too soon and the indexing never finished? Obviously a hassle, but you could also try backing up the Home directory, deleting it from your HD and then copying it back over (and leaving your PB on long enough for the indexing to finish).

[pv2b]

Maybe this hint over at macosxhints will help. Remember that Spotlight might see your Filevault as a seperate volume, and you might need to specify the path to your Filevault to have the spotlight index rebuilt for that. (It should be /Users/yourshortname)

[chinesebear]

So i dragged my home directory into the privacy thing and then back out and now everything works great. thanks all