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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
I know how to block a drive in Spotlight's privacy settings.
What I'm looking for is a way to stop Spotlight from indexing a drive every time I plug one in. I'm often connecting external drives for work & spotlight immediatley starts to index & I go in and add it to the blocked list in Spotlight> Privacy.
Is there a way to just have Spotlight NOT try to index a new drive?
Sorry, I missed that part.
Try this, add this file to the external drive.
touch /Volumes/name of the external drive/.metadata_never_index
This will add a file called .metadata_never_index to the root of that drive.
You can also disable spotlight
sudo mdutil -a -i offTo re-enable Spotlight:
sudo mdutil -a -i onBest way is to plug in the external drive and then go into system prefs.
Click on spotlight and then click the privacy tab. Drag the external hard drive from the desktop to this screen.
This will disable all spotlight indexing on that drive.
Are these new (to the Mac) drives each time? If not, putting a drive in Spotight>Privacy once should stick.
I don't use it, but maybe Spotless has some setting that will take care of this.
http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot3/index.php
Yes, different drives. I'll pull a drive from one machine (some Mac, some Windows) and work with the drives on my laptop, pulling files off them, etc.. As soon as I connect one, I get some major slowdown as it starts indexing.
I'll check that app out. Thanks for the link.
Thanks, but like I said that's what I'm doing now. It's annoying because some days I'm doing that several times a day.
Oops, post deleted, What I was going to suggest was suggested above. (does't seem to be a way to delete a post entirely unfortunately)
Stop Spotlight from indexing new drives
