Can’t locate /.Spotlight-V100 anywhere, spotlight has incomplete results even after index rebuild

spotlight

I tried everything I could find on StackExchange and the internet, including the official apple-suggested approach of removing adding and removing the volume to privacy https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 . This question sums up most of the things I tried Spotlight doesn't show applications also this answer https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/337782/146629

One thing many tutorials mention is that you should run sudo rm -rf ./Spotlight* or ./Spotlight-V100

However, I don't have it in root and I asked around friends with newest macOS and they did not find it in root either. I would like to give it a last shot and remove that index manually before I give up and try a system restore with Time Machine, but I can't seem to find the indices anywhere. Have they moved in recent versions? Any hints on how to make spotlight work again without system restore?

I'm on 10.15.6 (19G2021)

Best Answer

Just tested on a macOS Catalina 10.15.6 system, used the following command in Terminal to remove the .Spotlight-V100 directory:

sudo rm -r /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100

It deleted the .Spotlight-V100 directory and in less than a minute recreated it and started indexing the system again.