how to turn off or suspend spotlight indexing??

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Level 5

5,518 points

how to turn off or suspend spotlight indexing??

real quick one:

I just used one of my firewire project/sound library drives on a different logic setup (on leopard).. but now that I've connected the drive to my laptop again (on 10.4.11), it has automatically started indexing the drive for some reason. this is very annoying because I want to work now, can't have spotlight indexing the drive while trying to run audio.

for the life of me I can't find where to switch this thing off!! the only thing I saw was that I could make the drive 'private' from spotlight, but I don't want to do that cos I want to be able to search it.

hopefully I have just had a memory lapse because I am sure there is a way to stop the indexing process temporarily...

thanks in advance for any help!

MacPro Thingy 8GB -- MBP C2D 17" 2GB 7200rpm, Mac OS X (10.4.8), LP 7.2.3 / PT HD3 / UAD1 / apogee things

Posted on Jul 22, 2008 7:42 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

John Alcock

Level 5

5,032 points

Jul 22, 2008 9:12 AM in response to tbirdparis

Hi Antonio - good to see you - hope you're well.

I don't know if you can turn off Spotlight for a disk temporarily within the OS; as you've found you can disable a disk altogether, but that's not what you want.

I use a thing called Spotless, where you can turn indexing on and off, and it'll pick up where it left off when you re-engage indexing.

http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/

HTH.

John

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Answer 2

tbirdparis Author

Level 5

5,518 points

Jul 23, 2008 8:56 AM in response to John Alcock

hi john, yes am not on the forum a whole lot these days.. having a busy time these days, lot's of projects so no complaints. 🙂

thanks so much for your answer.. I'll grab that app for sure. but the thing that is driving me nuts is that I could've sworn there was a setting somewhere to pause the indexing process. maybe it was in an earlier version of OSX and they snuck it out from under our feet, or I'm just confused and thinking of the task manager in protools..

anyway thanks again, hope things are well for you.

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Answer 3

shamca

Level 1

125 points

Jul 23, 2008 9:46 AM in response to tbirdparis

I use the following line in a startup scrip to disable spotlight

do shell script "mdutil -i off /Volumes/iWanderer " password "<<your admin pw here>>" with administrator privileges

if you use script editor and save as an application with 'start up screen' checked, you should get a prompt to run the line (turn spotlight indexing off) or not.

Shaun

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Answer 4

Jul 23, 2008 10:00 AM in response to shamca

That's a great idea.

In fact, using Automator, it should be possible to create a "Launch Logic" chain which disables Spotlight indexing, creates an backup of XXX.logic files on /Volume/YYY, and then launches Logic.

Hmm… I'll experiment.

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Answer 5

Blueberry

Level 4

3,057 points

Jul 23, 2008 12:00 PM in response to John Alcock

That is a bad idea for two reasons:

1. Logic already disables Spotlight when in play/record, which is what you probably want.
2. Logic USES Spotlight, it will have a hard time to find certain content without it.

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Answer 6

shamca

Level 1

125 points

Jul 23, 2008 12:37 PM in response to Blueberry

I disagree entirely.

I've had no ill effects to date...loop browser is fine, media tabs work fine and my over speed and reliability is better than it was. I have:

- disabled spotlight
- turned off journaling
- turned off disk sleeping

Regards,
Shaun

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Answer 7

ambient8

Level 2

295 points

Jul 24, 2008 1:32 AM in response to Blueberry

Logic does utilize spotlight indexing in certain situations. If the drive was indexed after install of Logic Studio probably will not cause a problem to disable it. If it is not enabled when installing can cause issues with Logic finding resources.

You can disable Spotlight on any directory in System Preferences in OS X.

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Answer 8

Pancenter

Level 6

14,644 points

Jul 24, 2008 2:23 AM in response to ambient8

ambient8 wrote:
Logic does utilize spotlight indexing in certain situations. If the drive was indexed after install of Logic Studio probably will not cause a problem to disable it. If it is not enabled when installing can cause issues with Logic finding resources.

This is correct, if you have a current index on the drive, disabling spotlight
will not affect Logic or any other app from finding data that's already been indexed.

So, let spotlight do it's thing, shut it down, then enable at a convienient time for you, the user and owner of the machine <g>, then shut it down.

pancenter-

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