Alright, let’s talk about finding the horse. Not a real horse, you get me? It was about digging up some specific files I absolutely needed. Buried somewhere deep.
Started off simple. Fired up the Finder, you know, the usual search box. Typed in what I thought was the right name. Nothing. Well, not nothing, just a whole lot of junk that wasn’t it. Files with similar names, stuff from years ago, but not the files.
First Pass: The Obvious Stuff
Okay, maybe the name was slightly different. Tried variations. Used wildcards, like adding a little asterisk . Still digging through piles of digital garbage. The search was slow too, spinning wheel, making me wait. Felt like the computer was mocking me.
Thought maybe Spotlight indexing was messed up. Went into the system settings, tried to force a re-index on the drives I was searching. Left it running overnight. Came back the next morning, tried the search again. Same old story. Loads of useless results.
Getting Grumpy: Trying Different Angles
This is where it got annoying. The ‘horse’ was proving real stubborn. I knew these files existed. I put them there! But where?
- Tried searching by date. Maybe I could remember when I last touched them? Filtered down the results a bit, but still no clear winner.
- Tried searching by file type. Knew what kind of files they were. That helped narrow it down, but the list was still huge. Too much stuff saved over the years.
- Even tried looking inside files, searching for specific content I knew was in there. Finder can do that, sometimes. It just took forever and still didn’t pop the right ones to the top easily.
Honestly, felt like I was wading through mud. Click, wait, scroll, sigh. Repeat. This simple task was eating up my day.
Command Line? Maybe Later…
Considered dropping into the terminal. Using `find` or `grep`. Yeah, powerful stuff. But sometimes you just want the simple graphical tool to work, you know? Didn’t feel like wrestling with command syntax just then. Wanted the easy way. The promised way.
The Breakthrough (Sort Of)
Eventually, I stumbled upon them. Not through some clever search trick. No. I had to manually browse through old project folders. Folder by folder. Click, open, scan, back. Took ages. Found them nested way deeper than I remembered, in a folder with a completely unrelated name. Why? Don’t ask me. Past me made some weird choices.
So, found the horse. But it wasn’t the Finder that did the heavy lifting. It was just brute force clicking and looking. The whole experience just reminded me how messy things get. You save stuff, think you’ll remember, label it ‘final_final_v2_real’, and then poof. Lost in the digital attic.
The real job isn’t just finding the horse. It’s building a better stable in the first place, I guess. Keeping things tidy so you don’t waste half a day playing hide-and-seek with your own files. Lesson learned? Probably not, I’ll likely do it again.