How to find a file when you cannot remember its name

Most search tools assume you remember what you called the thing. You usually do not. What you remember is roughly when you made it, roughly what was in it, and what you were working on at the time. Those are all searchable, if you know where to put them.

Search the contents, not the name

Spotlight indexes the text inside documents, not just their filenames. A phrase you know is in the file will often find it faster than guessing at what you named it. This works for PDFs with real text, Pages and Word documents, plain text, Markdown, and email.

It does not work for scanned PDFs that were never run through text recognition, and it does not work for anything inside an image or a video. For those you are back to metadata, which is the next section.

Use the things you actually remember

Open a Finder window, press ⌘F, and add criteria with the plus button. The useful ones are rarely the defaults:

• Created date beats modified date. You remember when you made something far better than when you last touched it, and modified dates get reset by syncing, copying and backup software.
• Kind narrows hard and costs nothing. Knowing it was a spreadsheet removes almost everything else on the disk.
• File size is underrated. A four-hour video export and a screenshot are not going to be confused with each other.

Two loose criteria usually beat one precise one. Everything created in March that is larger than a gigabyte is a very short list.

Sort by date and read down the list

If you know roughly when you made a file, open the folder you think it might be in, switch to list view and sort by Date Created. Recognition is much easier than recall. You will often spot the file immediately even though you could not have named it.

The same trick works on a whole drive. Search the volume for the file kind, sort by date, and scan. It feels crude and it is frequently the fastest route.

Look for what was next to it

Files travel in groups. If you cannot find the export, find the project file, the client email, or the invoice from the same week, and look at what is around it. The folder that holds one thing from a job usually holds the rest.

This is also why the question is often not what the file is called but which disk it is on. Once you know that, the folder is usually obvious.

When the file is on a drive you cannot see

Every method above has the same requirement: the drive has to be plugged in. Spotlight does not search volumes that are not mounted, so if the file is on an external sitting in a drawer, no amount of clever searching will surface it. You are reduced to connecting drives one at a time until something turns up.

GetFerret catalogs each drive when you plug it in and keeps that catalog after you unplug it. Search once, across everything you own, and the result tells you which disk the file is on and where you said you put that disk. You still have to fetch it. You just stop guessing which one to fetch.

Previews work from the catalog too, so you can confirm a file is the right one before going to find the drive, which saves the particular frustration of connecting three disks to discover the fourth had it.