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Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Started by macgasm · 10 months ago

I’m an idiot… no really… I’ve spent the last hour researching hacks to exclude my newly acquired 1TB Firewire drive from being indexed and searched from Spotlight.  We all know how big of a resource hog spotlight is so any little bit helps in my o ... Continue reading »

13 comments

  • Bonzo

    1 year ago

    So now what do you do if you drag your external and its enclosing backup.backupdb into spotlights privacy tab and it STILL indexes your external on startup..?
    reply
  • Joshua Schnell

    1 year ago

    Hmm... did you delete the spotlight index files off of your main drives that you want unindexed??
    reply
  • nikolaus heger

    10 months ago

    What I want is a checkbox that says "don't index external drives". I never want to index external drives because this is a laptop, and therefore external drives are always only connected on a temporary basis. Most of them are backup drives or media storage, there's no use in indexing them at all.

    I don't think it's "easy" to remember to put a new external drive in the privacy tab in spotlight every time - it's more Microsoft-ish in that it's "too smart" and doing things behind your back that you don't want it to do. As in I just plugged in a USB drive, and wanted to copy some media files to it. It was incredibly slow, and CPU usage shot up too. Why? Because spotlight decided to index the drive, stealing I/O bandwidth and CPU time from me, and generally preventing me from doing what I want to do. Until I saw the spotlight indicator and put it in the privacy tab.

    The only reason I can think of why somebody might want to index their external hard drive is when the external drive acts as a data repository that's pretty much always connected to the computer, e.g. on a desktop Mac. It should be the exception rather than the rule.
    reply
  • Joshua Schnell

    10 months ago

    I agree it should be off by default. :)
    reply
  • Arnold

    6 months ago

    This doesn't workfor me for Spotlight forgets when my USB drives are unplugged :(
    reply
  • Mike Hardy

    6 months ago

    Echoing Arnold, when you unplug/replug your drive, Spotlight's privacy tab will have forgotten, and it'll get right to work indexing it for you.
    reply
  • macgasm

    2 months ago

    Yeah, hopefully this is something that they work out. I'm not sure that there's a fix for it. I usually do this for external drives that I leave plugged in. I share the frustration about thumb drives.
    reply
  • Ryan

    3 months ago

    There is nothing wrong with Vista, really. Have you tried to use it?

    And you really must give Windows 7, or even better, Windows Server 2008 a go. You'd forget Apple.

    And yes, ofcourse, Ubuntu. Beats Apple.

    Don't get me wrong. OS X is great. But Apple as a company is worse than Microsoft.
    reply
  • macgasm

    2 months ago

    I've played with Windows 7, but I have a hard time seeing how it's better then Apple's OS X. It certainly is better than Vista though (despite the rampant rumors that windows 7 is actually Vista with a GUI update).
    reply
  • A. Rawls

    2 months ago

    This is only a temporary fix, even with the "no externals" checkbox. I tried this and it worked until I reconnected the drive. Use this hint http://www.thejackol.com/2009/03/19/exclude-spo... for a more permanent solution, especially if you have a laptop and are using the external for backups, every night it will chug away indexing it for spotlight.

    I was also getting drive unexpectedly disconnected errors when spotlight tried to index the external, but this fixed all my issues.
    reply
  • macgasm

    2 months ago

    That's an excellent tip. I think I'm gonna write a post about it for the front page. :)
    reply
  • Ben

    2 months ago

    Slight problem: after you unplug the hard drive, Spotlight will forget about it completely and start indexing again the next time you plug it in.
    reply
  • macgasm

    2 months ago

    Ben, Apparently A. Rawls link above fixes that issue. I haven't tried it out personally yet, but it's on my list of todos.

    Here's the link: http://www.thejackol.com/2009/03/19/exclude-spo...
    reply

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