mdutil Command doesnt work

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/External/Back\ Up/

I believe I read the title of your HD wrong. If in fact it is External Back Up then do, what I think is easier and use: sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/"External Back Up"
Also pull icon(HD) from Dtop w/cursor to terminal screen for correct path/title. Sorry about misread earlier.

You should also remove the indices with the -E option. There's also Spotless

http://www.fixamac.net/software/spot2/

Also, if you're going to quote a path you need to do it from the beginning, not just at some arbitrary location in the middle. The above examples are not something I'd emulate.

Do you mean the command fails completely or that it doesn't "stick"?

If you disable indexing and then delete the index, do you still get results for that volume?

I suspect that erasing the volume is always going to set things back to square one, though. Depending on how you're cloning, though, you might be able to build in the disable-indexing-and-delete-index so that it is done automatically if the commands do work temporarily.

The only reasonable configuration I've found (on Tiger) is disabling Spotlight completely, though, which obviously isn't the solution you're looking for.

I'm sure there are free/open source alternatives to Spotless if you look, though. And I suspect all it is doing, as you say, is putting a fancy gui on things.

Are you really using 10.5.2? If so, maybe updating would help? (Since I don't have access to Leopard and have never used it, this is merely a suggestion - I've no idea whether Apple's updates have affected this or not.)

- cfr

Tohu wrote:
The command to disable spotlight indexing seems to work in terminal but as i said the spotlight search will find the files on that volume further on. Also it finds files that i add to this volume after executing the command so that what terminal tells me ("indexing disabled") cant be true. I tryed to delete the index with the mdutil -E command but that doesnt help.

If you look for something *right after* deleting the index, does it still find it?

Youre right with the suspicion that earasing a volume will reset spotlights privacy settings. I had then the same idea like you. Thought i can erase the volume, restore the privacy setting and copy the spotlights hidden directory from that volume somewhere else so i can copy it back next time i delete the volume. But that do not help and i think this is because of spotlight saves the privacy information additionally on the startup volume and i dont know wich file it is.

Hmm... I don't think that would work anyway. Just guessing but if Spotlight identifies volumes using their UUIDs, then nothing like that would work as you'll get a new UUID each time you erase. You'd have to incorporate the commands to set the privacy up into your backup routine somehow. For example, I used to do this with a script derived from (an earlier version of) Carbon Copy Cloner.

Like you, I found indexing tended to get re-enabled though I did find the delete and disabling scripts worked temporarily. As I say, it is easy to kill Spotlight completely but I'm assuming you want it to run for your main drive.

But my work around requires the basic disable/delete commands to work so that doesn't help you much...

- cfr