Nautilus not using tracker3 index in search for file content on an additional HDD

General Help
1

Hi, I am on Zorin 17.3 after years on kde and have run into a problem:

  1. tracker3 gives proper results when searching for file content on my main drive (fine).
  2. after adding file-storage HDD i made it automount using disks app.
  3. then I have added via deconf editor this drive to index.
  4. then I have added odt, ods, docx etc files to index also via deconf editor.
  5. tracker works fine: by giving tracker3 search + term in the terminal I am getting what i want on both drives.
  6. via the file manager i am getting properly the file content in home directory but searches on the additional drive still gives filenames only. It seems that despite the additional drive being properly indexed, the file app (nautilus) does not use index in search at this drive (but uses index for home...).

best
Piotr

2

I am not sure if this solution is still possible and also has an effect on nautilus , but you could try to make a symlink in your home directory to the external drive:

"As of Tracker 2.0 and Gnome 3.26, the Overview Search finds files in linked locations, as long as the link is under $HOME. So for example, linking $HOME/ExtraFiles to /mnt/HDD (and setting the former as a Search Location) would let the contents of /mnt/HDD to be searchable in the Overview.

From what I can tell, this is possible because Tracker now recurses into symlinks.

However, setting a non-home folder as a Search Location still doesn't let its contents appear in search results. So for the above example, setting /mnt/HDD itself as a Search Location won't make its contents appear in search results. The only way to make it work is for a link under $HOME to point to it."

3

@Forpli looks like a good idea. I'll try and let know !

best
P

4

@Forpli thank you, mounting additional HDD under Home caused some additional problems with filesync I have, so I'll stick just to terminal search, it is good enough for now. Hope it will be fixed in 18. Anyway thank you for help. It could be a viable solution for others. best
Piotr

1 Like
5

I'm not sure if this is the same setting that you've set through dconf-editor, but Nautilus has one for this under Preferences → Performance → Search in Subfolders. Set it to All locations, and see if that makes any difference.

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