As we meander down life’s path, we tend to pick up bits of this and that. And, over time, these things pile up to the point where, if we’re not organized, we lose track of them. And this often results in cries of “Honey/Mom/Dad/Jeeves, have you seen my glasses/lunchbox/dueling pistols!?” Wouldn’t it be great if the answer was more helpful than, “Well, where did you last see them?”
While there may be little we can do about locating these kinds of physical treasures, we needn’t have that happen with the files and folders on our Macs. And to prevent exactly this kind of thing, Apple has brought us Spotlight, technology built into OS X that allows us to easily find the items we seek.
It works this way: When you first install Mac OS X, Spotlight kicks into gear and begins indexing the contents of your drive. It keeps track of not only the names of your files and folders, but also their contents, the day and time each was created, the kind of files they are, and much more. As you create new files and folders, Spotlight indexes them as well, adding all this information to a hidden database file that it can later query to help you locate the stuff on your Mac.
And how exactly do you locate that stuff? Let me enumerate the ways:
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