Need help with spotlight-v100

Question

Level 1

11 points

Need help with spotlight-v100

So I have an old macbook pro mid 2009 running Mountain Lion. Yes old OS but Mac runs like a slug and figured upgrading would slow down further. Speaking of, decided to get an SSD. Prior to cloning my HD I decided to do one last virus scan with Avast. It's now 25 min into the scan and scanned over 54k files but they are all from /.spotlight-v100/store-V2......I've ran scans with avast before and hadn't noticed this. From what I gather reading online its a directory? Is this something that can be cleared out like cache? Just want to clean things up before cloning the SSD.

Thanks in advance

Posted on Sep 20, 2017 5:28 PM

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Answer 1

BobHarris

Level 9

56,921 points

Sep 20, 2017 5:45 PM in response to Jason_Lsn

Avast is not going to find anything of interest on a Mac. It is most likely just going to give you false positives.

Actually if you have been running Avast, it is like the root cause of your performance problems.

If you are concerned, then run MalwareBytesfor Mac (the free option), and/or EtreCheck. These 2 utilities are much more reliable about finding offending software on a Mac than all the other commercial anti-virus packages combined. And they do not damage your system, or cause it to have performance problems, or even panic.

If you want to post the EtreCheck output, someone in the forum will help analyze it, and give you additional suggestions on improving your system's performance.

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Answer 2

Jason_Lsn Author

Level 1

11 points

Sep 20, 2017 5:59 PM in response to BobHarris

Thanks for the malware tip but any input about the spotlight files?

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

56,921 points

Sep 20, 2017 6:32 PM in response to Jason_Lsn

If you manually delete them, Spotlight will recreate them. If you want to have Spotlight NOT index your disk, then use System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy and move your boot disk into the Privacy list.

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