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The following is targeted to experts on Time Machine backups and Spotlight searches: What would be the likely root cause of failure to explain the following? On a APFS formatted macOS 13.x and 14.x with Time Machine backing up via Thunderbolt to an external SSD, within a few hours of the well-known dialog "time machine disk not ejected properly" alert, Finder.app searches for documents using "contains word" eventually reported no matches -- even while viewing PDFs opened in Preview.app where Preview's search function matched the very same word that Finder.app could not find. However, File and Finder searches did return expected results on iOS, iPadOS and other macOS hosts where Time Machine was not enabled. Ultimately, it was determined for any user on a macOS 13.x or 14.x machine with TimeMachine backing up to an external thunderbolt SSD, after the timestamp associated with the first Time Machine backup marked by Disk Utility as needing repairs, Finder.app searches returned no results until the following work-around was applied: In System -> Energy Saver, disable "Put Hard Disks to Sleep"; Force Spotlight to rebuild its index on the macOS host Forget all external SSD Time Machine backup targets, erase and reformat them. Add those erased and reformatted external SSD Time Machine backups back as Time Machine destinations