Spotlight and excluding external drives

I have an external drive that I attempted to exclude in Spotlight. It reported that it was a Time Machine backup disk and the fact is that it has never been used for that purpose. I'm completely puzzled by this. Is that a feature of Catalina or a fault?

MacBook

Posted on Oct 18, 2019 6:58 PM

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1 reply

2point5 Author

Level 3

973 points

Oct 18, 2019 8:04 PM in response to 2point5

Found the problem.

Someone DID use it as a Time Machine backup (unbeknown to me) and it was a long time ago (2015). I removed the Backup.backupdb folder, emptied the trash and then had to remove a couple of .com.apple files in the root directory and it is now happily interpreted by Spotlight as just an ordinary external drive.

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Spotlight and excluding external drives

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