Searching on QNAP NAS volumes with Find Any File

(See also: Searching on Synology NAS)

Find Any File can use Apple's Spotlight engine for faster search on local and supported network volumes. All you need to do it check the option "Include Spotlight results" in FAF's Preferences window.

If you want to search on a QNAP volume, you need to observe a few particularities to make this work, though.

Verify that Spotlight search works on the NAS

1. In the QNAP web interface, make sure the Qsirch package is installed and running. Use the Qsirch search window in the web interface to make sure that you can search for file names and document text content on the NAS.
2. Mount the NAS volume on your Mac, open the NAS window in Finder and then use the Search field in the top right of the Finder window to search for the same file name or text that you searched for. It should work the same as in the Qsirch app before. If that works, you're set. Just make sure the the Spotlight option is also checked in FAF's Preferences.

Limitations when searching on the QNAP NAS

Note: Searching QNAP volumes with FAF requires version 2.5 or later!

While Spotlight generally lets you search for any fragment of a file name or document text, it is not working so well on QNAP systems where the underlying search engine is Qsirch. When searching on a QNAP volume, you need to keep these in mind.

You won't find file names if you omit the beginning of a word of the file name

(Remedy: Use the SSH Pro feature)

When searching for file names, the text you enter must match the start of a word in the file name.

For example, if you want to find the file named myreport2019.txt, you cannot find it by searching for report. Instead, you need to search for myreport or myreport2019.

You can also find it by 2019. That's because the NAS catalogs file names by first splitting them into words, and then later looks them up by those words, and numbers are seen as their own words in this regard.

FAF can't help you out here, which means that if you do not search for the start or full word of a file name you want to find, FAF'S Spotlight option won't find it. FAF will still continue to use its comparatively slow scanning of the network volume (i.e. without Spotlight's help) and eventually find it, but it means that the search will take much longer to find what you seek.

You won't find files if you search for their entire name with extension

(Remedy: Use the SSH Pro feature)

Searching for the full name of a file usually does not work, because as soon as the name extension is included, it won't be found. Since most file names include an extension, such as ".docx" etc, this means that if you search for the actual file name, e.g. report.docx, it won't be found.

However, FAF tries to work around this limitation by silently removing the extension from the search term when asking Spotlight (and in turn Qsirch) for the results, which may then return more results than desired (such as files with a matching name but a different extension) – but then FAF will filter out the ones that do not match the extension so that in the end you get exactly what you wanted. (If you find a case where this doesn't work, please contact me with the details so that I can fix it.)

You won't find text in a document unless you spell out entire words

Consider a document that containts the text authenticative. If you want to find that word, you need to write it entirely as-is. You cannot abbreviate it, or it won't be found. This is a significant shortcoming of Qsirch, but there seems to be no way around this. If you search for the same document on a local disk on your Mac, Spotlight will find it even if you just search for authen.

You won't find text in plain text files

(Remedy: Use the SSH Pro feature)

In my testing, Qsirch was not able to find text in plain text files, e.g. those ending in .txt or .xml, but only in rich text documents such as .docx and .rtf. Also keep in mind that PDF documents may only be searchable if you enable the optional OCR feature in Qsirch.