Finder with Big Sur is goofy. At home, it warns me of office drives not available that are in the SideBar. Bring the laptop back to work, and it seems to want to reindex the thunderbolt drive attached to the laptop. Not normal behavior to me. New M1, Reset power management.... Location awareness seems to be zero.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.2
When you first boot your Mac, there is a cluster of Spotlight mdworker processes reindexing your boot drive and anything else that was and is now connected, that can be discovered and indexed. There is no visual indication of which drive is receiving the Spotlight re-indexing, and location services cannot detect where a drive is located, or whether it should be indexed or not.
> WHY spotlight keep reindexing every morning
Is the external drive Mac formatted (Mac OS Extended or APFS)? Not FAT, exFAT or NTFS?
I did two things. First, I put almost everything in a Do Not Index folder on the external drive. Kept really important stuff indexed. Over the next week folders were slowly pulled out of there.
When Calculate folder size was selected, total numbers didn't add up. Sub folder totals were not being calculated.
My suspicion is indexing of the drive was never totally completed. Just as a folder's total would be shown, but inside that folder was another folder that was not included in total. If so, the indexing thought it was done, but a reboot, the OS realized it was not done and would resume.
second: I got a super fast Blade/SSD external drive that runs closer to the M1's internal drive speed. 2400 MB/s vs 200 MB/s RAID drive.
Hello Mark_B1,
We understand you'd like to know how to determine which drives are being reindexed for Spotlight. We'd like to help.
We have a resource that should help: Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac You'll be bare to understand how this process works on your Mac.
We hope this helps.
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities. Have a good one!
thanks, new MacBook Pro M1 just 2 weeks old. I ejected the 4tb drive, re-indexing stops. Don't look forward to reformatting the drive, then find out its still happens. Got a new external 1 tb thunderbolt SSD blade drive to put things I want indexed on. Will see whether it's just fast indexing, or the format type resolves this. thanks...
Question was not how to Exclude drives. But to find out WHY spotlight keep reindexing every morning. I suspect external drives that I WANT searchable. But simply disconnecting a laptop has never caused reindexing. Reset power mngt.. etc.. put drive in and out of exclude area.
Still, the computer reindexes every morning. A 4 tb USB drives takes a long time. EVERY DAY.
The same amount of time with Apple products in mixed corporate platform environments. You know as well as I that if the Apple product team chose to change how Spotlight works, whether they got it right, or introduced a bug, that they would not document that for us, and that we may notice the departure from the past behavior, but lose even more hair trying to determine how to deal with the result.
Your profile shows 11.2. Was the Spotlight issue present before or after updating to 11.2. Does it remain in 11.2.1?
Mac OS Extended is the drive I suspect. From High Sierra Computer. New Time Machine drive is APFS.
Reformatting 4 gb drive is not simple.
Thanks. got 40 years with Mac products. Never has attaching/detaching an external drive to a Laptop, or desktop caused Spotlight to Re-Index the drive constantly.
You are welcome. Hope the new configuration does what you need (and expect). Stay safe.
Hello! Having similar troubles and am curious as to the result of your troubleshoot with your new SSD. Any updates would be much appreciated! I hope for the better!
Kindly - E
how to tell which drive is being reindexed for spotlight
