Thank you for this question. It made me dive deeper.
I did a search and as I said in a previous post only some files showed up (grrrr)
So I tried connecting my external (exFat) drive to my mac.
I opened Turbo Tax
Clicked on "open a different return"
then went to the external
some files were dark black some grey.
I looked inside the active or Black files ... drilling down (again, it helps to remember where the .tax2021 file might have been saved)
some files were dead ends.
Some had Turbo Tax files nicely nestled at the end of the file path.
So even my Turbo Tax .tax2021 files which were NOT SEARCHABLE
showed up in my file folder that I LUCKLY had made.
TAX PREP
2021 Turbo tax files
2021 TT preliminary
2021 TAX FINAL
DRILL DOWN! you will find them
be sure to be the drive where you think they will be then open turbo tax and search from the "open a different return" button
If it was recently opened on the same computer with the same version of turbo tax it should just pop right up.
After updates and reinstalls it most likely will be a hunt!
One more Idea: if you are on a MAC.
When I click on the turbo tax logo on the bottom bar a list of .tax2021 files show up in the pop up (TT is open and I was about to close it when I noticed this)
also are some .tax 2020 files.
