How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

Question

Level 1

65 points

How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

I work in an environment where we plugin several different costumer harddrives all day long as part of our working process. Often only to extract one file from a given drive. Therefore its annoying that Spotlight automatically starts indexing these drives, because it slows down everthing, but also because our windows costumers suddenly see these weird mac files on their drives, that are invisible to the macuser. The Privacy setting is not of much use, as its impossible to add oru costumers drives to the list - we simply don't know the drive until we see it.

How can spotlight stop indexing?

MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz Santa Rosa 4Gb RAM, Mac OS X (10.5), The MBP that often skips the first letter when typing :(

Posted on Oct 29, 2007 2:22 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 29, 2007 6:59 AM in response to Tournesol

Go into System Preferences and select Spotlight.

Here you can access the settings for what is indexed.
Go to the Tab marked 'Privacy' (I think that is what it is called, it is the right hand tab in the Spotlight Preference Pane).

Then click on the + button at the bottom of the window and select the drives you don't want spotlight to index.

Ian

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Answer 2

Oct 29, 2007 7:14 AM in response to Tournesol

Typing "sudo mdutil -i off -a" will turn off spotlight for all volumes. This includes your current one. If this is an issue you might want to try "sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Macintosh HD" after to turn on only your hard drive. (Make sure Macintosh HD is the name of your drive)

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Answer 3

*diaz*

Level 1

0 points

Oct 29, 2007 4:50 AM in response to Tournesol

Hi Tournesol,
you can stop the indexing with help of the program "mdutil" which you can access by the terminal.

For example to turn off the indexing on your Macintosh HD just type: "sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Macintosh HD"
For more information about mdutil type "man mdutil" into the terminal.

Andreas

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Answer 4

IronRaph

Level 1

0 points

Oct 29, 2007 8:28 AM in response to pardthemonster

Hum I still have some troubles because using mdutil -i off -a will only write some info in the .Spotlight-V100 directory of each indexed drive.

If I put a new drive or if I remove this directory (example in a windows shared usb key to avoid having an hidden folder) Spotlight will still index the volume.

Have you got a solution for such an issue?

Thanks a lot!

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Answer 5

Tournesol Author

Level 1

65 points

Oct 29, 2007 9:08 AM in response to Ian Parkinson

The Privacy option is okay for private users, but at work we receive alot of harddrives from costumers and we simply cannot spend the extra time waiting for a drive to be indexed every time it is connected. That drive may never be connected again as it belongs to a costumer, and it is impossible for us to add drives to the Privacy pane, because we do not know they exist before we see them infront of us. The ption to disable all external drives from being indexed would be great. Or that the indexing can be stopped in the spotlight menu, or that the indexing will not start until 10 minutes after the drive has been mounted - and only if the drive is inactive.

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Answer 6

Dec 23, 2007 2:22 PM in response to Tournesol

Is there anything new regarding this thread ?

it is overkill to index an foreign USB/Disk media which is inserted into the computer.
takes time, space, and, may yield to data corruption.

There should be an option to hold down a key when you insert a media which then will prevent spotlight from indexing the drive.
Or, better, an option to mount unkown drives read-only.

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Answer 7

IronRaph

Level 1

0 points

Oct 29, 2007 7:05 AM in response to Ian Parkinson

It's not a good solution...
I want to completly diable indexing on external drives.
I don't want to disable each external/usb drive I plug in!

Thank you for your help.

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Answer 8

IronRaph

Level 1

0 points

Oct 29, 2007 7:20 AM in response to pardthemonster

Ok thanks I lot I'll try this!
And yes not using Spotlight is an issue for me 😉 I can't live without it...

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Answer 9

sgginc

Level 3

676 points

Dec 23, 2007 3:00 PM in response to Tournesol

Spotless will do it but is not yet Leopard compatible:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26842

What thread has the ELP! people gone to?

ken

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