What if you're sure you're search This Mac and you're still not finding a file you know is there. This Mac is selected rather than Projects, the name of the folder.īut what if that's not the problem. So you can set this up for Search This Mac and now it doesn't matter if I'm in this Projects file and I search for meteor it will find that file even though I've started out the search in the Projects folder. So wherever your last search was it will search there. You can go to Finder Preferences and you go to Advanced there is an option here, When Performing a Search, and you can say I want it to always search the current folder, I want to always just search This Mac which will get you what you want, and also you can say Use the previous search scope.
How can you prevent this? Well, if you always want to start your searches off searching your entire Mac you can set a preference for that. I had Projects selected instead of This Mac. It finds a few other files with the word meteor in them as well.
Now I can easily solve this problem by switching from Projects to This Mac and now, sure enough, it finds this List of Meteor Showers. So when I started the search it started looking in the folder called Projects. Now before I did the search I was looking in a folder called Projects. The main thing is, and what is wrong here, and some of you may have already spotted it, is at the top here it says Search and I can choose This Mac or Projects. Well, there's several different things that can be wrong. What's going on here? Why can't I find this file? It should be real easy for your Mac to find this file but it doesn't show it. I'm even going to select File Name Matches and you can see nothing shows up. Now I'm in a different Finder window at a different time and I want to search for it. Before I do I want to show you that I've got this file here called List of Meteor Showers. Video Transcript: So let's say I want to perform just a regular search for files on my Mac. Check out Fixing Broken File Search On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.