Finding specific things
Optimised storage means some of your files are not really on your Mac. Search behaves differently for those, in ways worth understanding.
With Optimise Mac Storage enabled, macOS evicts file contents while keeping a small placeholder. Finder shows the file with a cloud icon and a download arrow.
The name is still local, so searching by name works. The contents are not, so content search cannot match text inside an evicted file.
That distinction explains most confusion: you can find the file, but Spotlight cannot find a phrase inside it.
Right-click → Download Now, or simply open it. To download a whole folder, select it and choose Download Now.
To keep a folder always local, right-click → Keep Downloaded where offered.
Evicted files show a cloud icon in Finder. In the Terminal, their on-disk size is near zero while the reported size is full — one of the few places du and ls visibly disagree.
If Desktop & Documents Folders is enabled in iCloud settings, those folders move into iCloud Drive. Their real path becomes:
~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/DesktopFinder still shows them in the sidebar as Desktop and Documents, but scripts and Terminal commands using ~/Desktop may not find what they expect. This catches people out constantly.
A filename index reads directory entries, which exist for evicted files too. So name search works on everything in iCloud Drive whether downloaded or not — which is usually what you want, since finding it is the first step to downloading it.
No. The contents are not on disk, so there is nothing local to index. Names remain searchable.
~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Desktop, though Finder still shows it as Desktop.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
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