Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

After reading through all of this as, my Spotlight takes forever to estimate the indexing, I have two suggestions for Apple.

1) Create Oerating Systems that actually work without the people (customers) who pay for all the hardware having to endlessly alter and tweak settings which really are the result of poor design/sotfware issues and negligent testing.

2) Give the Mac's that your engineers say work faultlessly to your customers and take their malfunctioning Mac's in return until you learn to understand the concept of responsibility.

Please stop using your customers as free labour and charging them to phone you to sort out the problems that you have created. We have already paid and you treat us with contempt.

I have become so frustrated with the speed of my iMac 27" Mid 2010.

It's taking over 40 seconds to load Pages or iPhoto or really any application that I have removed my hard drive from Spotlight !

So I now have Time Machine and my HD removed from Spotlight and it'd back running at normal speed without the HD crunching awaw all the time.

So Apple thank you for making one of the best features of OSX - Spotlight usless on my Mac !

Try this

OS X Mavericks 10.9.3 (Update (Combo)

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1746

This is a full update with any missing bits that you may have from your Mavericks OS on your system and can sort out various problems with its operation. What can also be relevant, is whether you have any bits missing from a previous OS as, the errors move along intact within your computer. It speeded up my iMac and sorted out various problems that I was experiencing.

So, try this first and then if not get the relevant Combo update for the last OS that you had before updating to Mavericks.

Hi, try this.

Go to System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Search Results Tab, and Uncheck everything there.

Check the Spotlight search at top right of menu bar and you may see that it has stop.

Now, go back to System Preferences and check ONLY the things that you want it to search for.

Next on the Privacy Tab, you can select folders or Drives you DON'T want spotlight to check for.

This worked for me.

Peace out.

My MBA kept looping the "Estimating indexing time" and not moving on. Then I added my StorEDGE to the Privacy tab in spotlight preference pane and everything went back to normal. I just don't have the indexing of the files on the PNY StorEDGE 128Gb sd card, but I can live with that.

Thanks Martin Form the linked update

OS X Mavericks 10.9.3 (Update (Combo)

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1746

sorted it for me.

Hi ajl124. Glad that it did the trick. Pity that I cannot get a tick against 'this sorted it for me' but someone else got that earlier in the topic. I trust that your Mac is running well again now. 🙂

Unfortunately, only the original poster can award points and asking for them violates the ToU of these forums.

Everything violates the TOU's of this forum lol. I didn't ask for anything. 🙂

What solved it for me was excluding a partition (Running the Yosemity Beta) from indexing.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > "+" > Add partition

I just installed 10.9.4 and so far it does NOT seem to fix the "estimating indexing forever" problem for me!

I also cannot add my external harddrive to the spotlight privacy because of an "unknown error".

It doesn't seem to "just work" anymore. 😟

Thank you for the fix!

It worked for me!

Try this

OS X Mavericks 10.9.4 Update (Combo)

This is a full update with any missing bits that you may have from your Mavericks OS on your system and can sort out various problems with its operation. What can also be relevant, is whether you have any bits missing from a previous OS as, the errors move along intact within your computer. It speeded up my iMac and sorted out various problems that I was experiencing.

So, try this first and then if not get the relevant Combo update for the last OS that you had before updating to Mavericks.

If the combo download gets rid of your 'error' then:

Here's how you can prevent Spotlight from indexing external drives and Time Machine backups.

1. Connect the volume or drive you want excluded to your Mac.

2. Open the System Preferences application.

3. Click on Spotlight, then click on the Privacy tab.

4. Drag your volume or drive into the Privacy menu to exclude them from Spotlight's indexing.

I had this problem for months - it even moved to a new iMac during migration.

In addition, both the original and new mac would not sleep according to the Energy Saver settings.

I *also* had problems with Time Machine backups occasionally never finishing.

After noticing in many posts the possible connection between Spotlight indexing and Time Machine I tried the following steps, which solved all 3 problems - and may be a solution for others. (I suspect there are multiple factors here, so not everyone may benefit).

NOTE: I had been using removable drives for offsite backup (allowing Time Machine to round robin between 2 of those and a Time Capsule.)

This meant the removables were frequently offline. I also have an external Thunderbolt drive I thought might be a factor.

Here is what I did:

- using System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, added the online drives (internal and external - not the removables) to the 'Prevent' (excluded) list.

- using System Preferences > Time Machine, removed the removable drives from the list of selected disks for backups.

- turned Time Machine OFF completely (temporarily).

- restart

- waited and noticed the Mac had started sleeping normally

- went back to Spotlight and removed the external drive from the 'Prevent' list

- waited noted that Spotlight indexed it quickly and correctly

- took a deep breath and removed the internal drive from the Prevent list, and waited...

- no "estimating" forever! instead, a progress bar and 30 minutes estimated time.

- within 30 minutes the internal was fully indexed and Spotlight was behaving.

- waited a while longer to see that Spotlight kept working, and the mac kept sleeping normally after wake-ups.

- finally turned Time Machine ON, with only the Time Capsule (no removables)

- successful backup right away, and everything has been fine for several days.

In any case, I suspect using removables with Time Machine - and having them go offline for weeks at a time while they were offsite - were a factor for me.

This is probably a fairly uncommon use case, and Apple may simply not have found the combination that causes problems... hopefully they are watching.

Hope this helps someone!