How to temporarily turn OFF Spotlight Indexing?

Hello Photon3,

Check out this article for different ways to temporarily or permanently disable Spotlight indexing.
http://www.nerdlogger.com/2009/01/how-to-turn-spotlight-off-and-on.html

B-rock

to turn off spotlight temporarily, open terminal and enter this command

% sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

to turn it back on, run this command:

% sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

J GG

The advice you have been given is incorrect. There is no need whatsoever to turn Spotlight off even temporarily. Just prior to the cloning you should check that indexing of your boot volume is not occurring - simply because the competition for CPU will slow the cloning down. Just click on the Spotlight symbol at the right hand end of your menubar to see that you only have the text entry box.


Also, there is usually no need to have a clone indexed, and so you should put the target volume into the Privacy tab of System Preference / Spotlight -- that will ensure that your target does not start to be indexed during the cloning and that the target volume does not become indexed later. Should you ever need to work on the clone and want it to be indexed, just remove that volume from 'Privacy'.


Ignoring any references to Carbon Copy Cloner, see http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=14531.


Andreas

Your assumption is correct. A volume in ‘Privacy’ won’t be searchable because it will have no index. I would agree with you that that wording is not as well chosen as it might have been! 🙂


Don’t forget that if you ever erase that volume the OS will remove it from Privacy and you will need to replace it. Otherwise it will remain there.


Andreas

Thank you. Happy cloning!


Andreas