Macgasm - Latest Comments in Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

macgasm — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:35:18 -0000

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...

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Ben — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:29:33 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

macgasm — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:19:20 -0000

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

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

macgasm — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:17:13 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

macgasm — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:15:37 -0000

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).

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

A. Rawls — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:32:52 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Ryan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:49:14 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Mike Hardy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:32:20 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Arnold — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:49:14 -0000

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

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Joshua Schnell — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:02:04 -0000

I agree it should be off by default. :)

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

nikolaus heger — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:54:41 -0000

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.

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Joshua Schnell — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:47:44 -0000

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

Re: Stop Spotlight From Indexing Your External Drives

Bonzo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:27:28 -0000

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..?