Skip to content

Indexing appears stuck

Symptoms

A scan's progress has not visibly moved for a long time, or the numbers crawl far more slowly than expected.

What this usually means

Genuinely stuck scans are rare. Far more often:

  • The drive is slow. USB hard drives and network shares can be an order of magnitude slower than an internal SSD — on hundreds of thousands of files, "hours" is normal, not stuck.
  • The scan is deep in a heavy stretch — hashing huge video files, or extracting text from large documents, produces long stretches where the file count barely moves even though real work is happening.
  • The scan finished and the app is idle — see Running but 0% CPU.
  • The source drive disconnected mid-scan (a sleeping USB drive, a dropped network share).

Safe steps to try

  1. Wait longer than feels natural — check disk activity (Activity Monitor's Disk tab on macOS, Task Manager's Performance tab on Windows). Sustained disk reads mean the scan is working.
  2. Check the drive is still connected and readable — open it in Finder / File Explorer and confirm files open.
  3. Check the enrichment/progress panel in the interface — it shows what is currently being worked on and an honest estimate.
  4. If nothing moves for a very long time and there is no disk activity: quit and reopen safely (how), then check whether progress resumes.

What not to delete or change

  • Do not delete the catalogue database — everything indexed so far is in it, and deleting it guarantees a full re-scan.
  • Do not force-kill the process as a first resort; use Quit ArchiveMind.
  • Do not unplug the drive mid-scan to "reset" it.

Information to collect for support

  • Roughly how many files the repository has and what kind of drive it is on (internal SSD, USB disk, network share).
  • What the progress panel showed, and for how long it did not move.
  • Whether there was disk activity.
  • The newest archivemind.log — see Finding logs.