6

I recently updated to the newest Google Drive app for macOS (49.0.9.0), which replaces Backup & Sync and Drive File Stream (the one for G Suite/Google Workspace customers).

After updating, I can no longer find my files in Spotlight. Also, I used to be able to look them up in Alfred.

The Drive files used to be downloaded to ~/Google Drive, but now they are mounted as volumes under /Volumes:

➜ ls -l /Volumes
total 64
drwx------@ 1 werner  staff  16384 Jul 20 08:32 GoogleDrive
drwx------@ 1 werner  staff  16384 Jul 20 08:32 GoogleDrive-115072400088661348852
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root    wheel      1 Jul 13 12:47 Macintosh HD -> /
drwxr-xr-x  3 root    wheel     96 Jun 22 09:42 com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots

Note that I have two drives here, a private one, and one for Google Workspace.

I've already tried opening the Spotlight preferences, and dragging the volumes to the list of excluded locations under Privacy, then removing them again, but that didn't work.

What can I do to make them be found again?

slhck
  • 235,242

1 Answers1

7

As of December 2021, this seems to be possible only via two options. This is explained in another Q&A on Ask Different.

The options are:

  1. Use a Python script to manually change the configuration of the SMB server so you can index it. This is explained here. The drawback is that the config gets overwritten by Google, so you have to restart Google Drive possibly on a daily basis, and re-apply the script.
  2. Open the preferences for Google Drive and choose the option to mirror all files to a local folder instead of syncing them over the network. Here, the drawback is that your files now take up space on the local disk, which may not be an option for larger (i.e., Google Workspace) drives.
slhck
  • 235,242