Q: Mavericks: Spotlight Indexing Forever!

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!

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. 

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?

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

Thanks! That worked for me as well.

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.