After starting up, Spotlight immediately starts churning away and bringing my Mac to a crawl. The problem is that most or all the hard drives and disk images get removed from the Privacy list. Has anyone else seen this? Is there a fix?
Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), Mac Pro Early 2009
Might be a corrupt .plist.
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Quit the application.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.Spotlight.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.
Might be a corrupt .plist.
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Quit the application.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.Spotlight.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.
The cache doesn’t matter. If you throw away a plist, and then launch the application, it creates a new plist that is either blank or filled with default values. It does not use the old plist from the cache. Try it with any application in which you have added or altered preferences. Caching is about speed. It is not about file backup. The OS does not maintain cache files permanently, and no sensibly-written applications rely on caches for file recovery.
I'll take your advice about tossing the plist file. The rest of your advice is absurd. Two backups, restart my Mac, and open the application (It's Spotlight; it's always open.) to throw away a plist file? You just do it. Spotlight will make a new one the next time it indexes. I don't like boilerplate responses that don't fit the situation.
The OS caches the .plists, which is why you need to restart.
Spotlight forgets Privacy settings
