Where are the older downloaded files on the Mac?

Question

It is very strange that I can't find older downloaded files, even though I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and now to Mountain Lion, and it was done on the same partition.

So my ~/Downloads folder actually shows files all the way back to last October 2011.

But inside, there is no VLC-2.0.1.dmg, even though currently installed on my Mac, it is the 2.0.1 version. So where could that file have gone? I never delete downloaded files (because the hard drive has 100GB+ of free space so 20MB or 30MB isn't a problem).

So the major question is, where could that file have gone? I used Spotlight to look for any file name with "vlc" in it, but only can find the app itself and a vlc-1.1.12.dmg.

Update: by the way, I can find the file by using Google, for vlc-2.0.1 site:videolan.org but still would be interested to know where in the hard disk can it be?

Answer 1

Files downloaded from Safari or Chrome usually have a kMDItemWhereFroms attribute:

mdfind kMDItemWhereFroms==*

If you install an upgrade directly from an application, it doesn't usually download a disk image or at least keep it in a user folder.

Answer 2

Open terminal. Type this (this is gonna be slow):

sudo find / -iname '*vlc*'

This command will list all the files on all of your devices contains vlc in name.