[ksaj]

I gave up on Finder finding things years ago. Set up your own local "cloud" the moment you have more files than you can personally remember accurately.

Run your data life the way a corporation would. After 10 years of compute, you surely have a corporation's worth of data, and probably 10 partially and/or randomly updated and forgotten versions of a lot of it.

It'll just keep growing and frizzing out if you don't maintain it. Just like the rusty panels under your station wagon...

[rman666]

Can you expand on your answer, please? What do you mean by a “local cloud”? How will that improve search?

[ksaj]

I'm no salesman, so ymmv, but I use Nextcloud, and a network hard drive for all my media. My backups are literally taken from only those 2 points. Everything is in its place, or easy enough to get there when it isn't.

Edit added: Everything is where I expect it to be from the start. And I even have a Misc directory tree for new things I haven't classified yet. As for apps, I keep a file listing what I install, but don't bother backing them up. Fresh software smells better. If my desktop fries, meh, get a new one and install everything on that list and then get back to the cloud. All my systems share the same data, so no duplicates outside of the backup.

This doesn't help your current issue, but it'll make sure it never happens again.