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Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

Upgraded to Mavericks and system is unbelievable slow. Searched this forum and found many hints regarding Spotlight. Noticed that mine keeps indexing forever. It tells me all the time "estimating indexing time", sometimes it starts the actual indexing, but then I find myself back again waiting for this #$@! estimating the time. This is going on now for 2 full days without the slightes improvement.

Not only the slow speed makes the computer almost unusable, files cannot be found anymore neither via spotlight nor finder! Same applies to email.

Any advice will be highly welcome. Thanks!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Gmail

Posted on Oct 27, 2013 6:22 AM

110 replies

Aug 16, 2014 6:19 AM in response to thinkpuppet

Another option to try... http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/spotlight-control-mac-os-x-mavericks-10-9/

This worked for me. I also omitted my external backup drive, but I'm leaving it omitted. Why do you need Spotlight to search a backup drive anyway? I also omitted my dropbox folder.

Aug 16, 2014 6:45 AM in response to Derek_Brown

Thanks for information. Quick question. If Spotlight is turned off from indexing external drive and TimeMachine backups are on external drive does this affect searches in TimeMachine for backed up data that has been deleted from one's Mac hdd?

Oynnad

Level 1

0 points

Aug 18, 2014 6:12 AM in response to sageonthehill

Hello guys, thank you for all the helpful responses.

Here's what I did:

System preferences - Spotlight - Privacy Tab - add Transcend Jet Drive Lite 360 sd card to list.

Spotlight then began to re-index the files, and this time round the progress bar was moving! Didn't take note of how long it took, but prob under 10min cos I was away for that long and it was done when I was back.

My machine is a late 2013 15 inch retina macbook pro, running OS X Mavericks 10.9.4, 2.0 GHz i7, 16gb ram, 256gb hdd with 148gb used.

Hope this helps, cheers!

And thanks again for all the tips and workaround

zigomir

Level 1

4 points

Aug 30, 2014 5:24 AM in response to tylerabell

Thanks! That worked for me as well.

Sep 5, 2014 1:11 PM in response to sageonthehill

I have my iTunes library stored on an SD card. I removed the card, and it immediately corrected my problem.

My problem now is, how do I use iTunes without killing my battery and slowing down my machine.

Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!