Finale Forum

I seem to be missing a Finale file on my Mac computer. Is there a
special way to find it other than "search?"

Not that I know of...

“Search” Is a Spotlight feature. Unfortunately, it tries to fine everything on the internet, too. There’s every chance it won’t locate files on your Mac. It rarely does on mine. It also won’t show the path to a file which I find annoying.

Use “Find” in the Finder menu instead. It can find everything on a Mac. Sometimes you need to filter the search and that can be difficult. There are times when Find is a time consuming PIA so...

There are utilities that are user friendly and will pull up everything without filtering. Most are shareware though some are cheapware —there may be freeware out there as well. One I used was called FindFile but haven’t used it lately because it wasn’t updated to 64 bit (that may have changed).

MikeHalloran wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 15, 2020 3:45 am

“Search” Is a Spotlight feature. Unfortunately, it tries to fine everything on the internet, too. There’s every chance it won’t locate files on your Mac. It rarely does on mine. It also won’t show the path to a file which I find annoying …

To search for files on my Mac I use Spotlight all the time.
When I hit ⌘I, it shows me a File Info window with the path (to the selected search result).
Am I missing something?

musicus wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:24 pm

I seem to be missing a Finale file on my Mac computer. Is there a
special way to find it other than "search?"

Here's Apple's help pages for filtering searches:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/m ... h15155/mac

If it doesn't show up, you'll need to search in your Time Machine backup.

MikeHalloran wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 15, 2020 3:45 am

“Search” Is a Spotlight feature. Unfortunately, it tries to fine everything on the internet, too. There’s every chance it won’t locate files on your Mac. It rarely does on mine. It also won’t show the path to a file which I find annoying.
Use “Find” in the Finder menu instead. It can find everything on a Mac.

Command Space and "Find" in Finder are both part of Spotlight. The former it gives you the most recent 5 results, and there's a link at the bottom to "Show All in Finder", which gives you all the results and options for filtering.

You can display the path to a file by holding Command down on the selected item in Spotlight. You can turn off "Spotlight Suggestions" to remove internet results. If you're not getting good results you may need to reindex the database.

Look in the Documents folder on your hard drive. If you did a default installation of Finale, there should be a folder called "Finale Files" there. Inside this folder is a folder called "Backups". All of your backups should be in there.

BuonTempi wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 15, 2020 7:40 am

musicus wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:24 pm

I seem to be missing a Finale file on my Mac computer. Is there a
special way to find it other than "search?"

Here's Apple's help pages for filtering searches:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/m ... h15155/mac

If it doesn't show up, you'll need to search in your Time Machine backup.

MikeHalloran wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 15, 2020 3:45 am

“Search” Is a Spotlight feature. Unfortunately, it tries to fine everything on the internet, too. There’s every chance it won’t locate files on your Mac. It rarely does on mine. It also won’t show the path to a file which I find annoying.
Use “Find” in the Finder menu instead. It can find everything on a Mac.

Command Space and "Find" in Finder are both part of Spotlight. The former it gives you the most recent 5 results, and there's a link at the bottom to "Show All in Finder", which gives you all the results and options for filtering.

You can display the path to a file by holding Command down on the selected item in Spotlight. You can turn off "Spotlight Suggestions" to remove internet results. If you're not getting good results you may need to reindex the database.

Have you actually tried any of this?

I'm quite fine with what I posted. Without going into my music industry day job, it's mostly research and finding everything from documents to references, quite a bit of it accumulated over 30 years and sitting on my Mac, is a daily, sometimes hourly occurrence. With a couple TB of storage to search, I am quite familiar with how to find things and do it quickly.

Having reread this thread, I'm pretty certain that I would not have to do a Time Machine search. I could write a few more pages on this subject (the other part of my job) but I'll spare everybody.