Prevent automatic removal of the Spotlight index due to low disk space

I am guessing that when disk space runs low, it automatically deletes the Spotlight index to make room for virtual memory. Then when space becomes available it reindexes. But I'm not sure about that.
Since my MacBook Air SSD is only 128 GB, I often work with little free disk space and the re-indexing drives me crazy.
I tried to disable Spotlight, remove its index and reindex. Also check filesystem and repair permissions. In diagnostic reports (~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/) nothing about reindexing is mentioned.
You can say that I should control the amount of free space but also should be another way. Disabling Spotlight isn't the option.
Crosspost: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/37321/prevent-automatic-removal-of-the- spotlight-index-due-to-low-disk-space

You can say that I should control the amount of free space .....
Then I will
See if you have Time Machine Local Backups taking up space, and turn it off with:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
Also consider turning off hibernate mode
I am guessing that when disk space runs low, it automatically deletes the Spotlight index to make room for virtual memory. Then when space becomes available it reindexes. But I'm not sure about that.
Not sure if that's the case, but low disk space can be causing issues. What % of your HD is free?

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Event ID 4103 — Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Service Startup
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc774406(v=ws.10).aspx
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Is the spotlight index stored on the boot drive or individual volumes?

Hello!
My questions are pretty simple, and are sumarized here (from the block of text below):
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Secondly, if it's stored on the boot drive, can I copy these files to another Tiger-running Mac to eliminate the need to re-index the hard drives? Where do I find them?
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Now for the long explenation:
I have been preparing to upgrade my Powerbook to Leopard within the next month or two, and as such, I bought a new hard drive to dedicate one of my old drives to Leopard and Time Machine. Because I have three extrernal hard drives, I needed to move about 500 GB of data between the thee drives to make room for what was on the now-dedicated drive. Of course, this requires that Spotlight re-index the "new" drives.
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Each drive's Spotlight index is located on that drive.
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I'm wondering about the concept that Spotlight makes a really deep search -- and record -- of all user-created text files on your computer.
In order for Spotlight to know that a file called "My Personal Stuff.rtf" contains the words "bank", "account", "number", "1234-567890" it needs to copy each of those keywords into the Spotlight index. That means in effect that Spotlight is making a *complete copy* of *all words* in *all text documents* ever on or temporarily connected to your computer, except for un-searched words like "the", "and", etc.
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I'm not the first to wonder this -- see this archived, and cluelessly unanswered and unconcluded -- post from last year:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1390619

glkdfhgkdfjghdfkgjhdfkgjh wrote:
I'm wondering about the concept that Spotlight makes a really deep search -- and record -- of all user-created text files on your computer.
In order for Spotlight to know that a file called "My Personal Stuff.rtf" contains the words "bank", "account", "number", "1234-567890" it needs to copy each of those keywords into the Spotlight index. That means in effect that Spotlight is making a *complete copy* of *all words* in *all text documents* ever on or temporarily connected to your computer, except for un-searched words like "the", "and", etc.
If you've ever plugged your thumb drive into a public Mac somewhere, Spotlight got to work and copied all the (key-) words in every file on your thumb drive into the Spotlight index on that computer.
If you're happy that at least you had Filevault turned on when your laptop with the big corporate secrets and list of thousands of people's personal info got stolen -- there was also a non-Filevaulted Spotlight index on that computer with all the contents of every document extracted as keywords, for the sophisticated cyber criminals to pore over.
Of course, you can turn off Spotlight indexing -- if you never want to be able to find a file on your computer even by file name... on your own computer at least. Not on that other computer you're plugging your drive into.
Is there something I'm missing here?
yes, you are. spotlight index for a drive is kept on that drive. it's not copied to any other drive. that also applies to virtual volumes contained in disk images like a filevaulted home directory. that is, spotlight index for a filevaulted home directry is stored inside the sparse bundle with that home directory. nobody else has access to it and when you are not logged into a filevaulted account there is no trace of the spotlight index for it on the system.
I'm not the first to wonder this -- see this archived, and cluelessly unanswered and unconcluded -- post from last year:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1390619
Message was edited by: V.K.

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just change the details at the start of the script to point the script to the right location to create log files. you will need to have a plain text file containing a list of server names or ip addresses that you want to check drive space on.
# Change the following variables based on your environment
#specify the path to the file you want to generate containing drive space information
$html_file_dir = "\\server\share\DriveSpace"
#specify the path and file name of the text file containing the list of servers names you want to check drive space on - each server name on a seperate line in plain text file
$server_file = "\\server\share\servers.txt"
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$from_address = "[email protected]"
#specify the to address for the email
$to_address = "[email protected]"
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$email_gateway = "smtp.domain.com" # Can either be DNS name or IP address to SMTP server
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$smtp_user = ""
$smtp_pass = ""
# Change the following variables for the style of the report.
$background_color = "rgb(140,166,193)" # can be in rgb format (rgb(0,0,0)) or hex format (#FFFFFF)
$server_name_font = "Arial"
$server_name_font_size = "20px"
$server_name_bg_color = "rgb(77,108,145)" # can be in rgb format (rgb(0,0,0)) or hex format (#FFFFFF)
$heading_font = "Arial"
$heading_font_size = "14px"
$heading_name_bg_color = "rgb(95,130,169)" # can be in rgb format (rgb(0,0,0)) or hex format (#FFFFFF)
$data_font = "Arial"
$data_font_size = "11px"
# Colors for space
$very_low_space = "rgb(255,0,0)" # very low space equals anything in the MB
$low_space = "rgb(251,251,0)" # low space is less then or equal to 10 GB
$medium_space = "rgb(249,124,0)" # medium space is less then or equal to 100 GB
#### NO CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE BELOW UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING
# Define some variables
$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$date = Get-Date -UFormat "%Y%m%d"
$html_file = New-Item -ItemType File -Path "$html_file_dir\DiskSpace_$date.html" -Force
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$html_file
# Function to be used to convert bytes to MB or GB or TB
Function ConvertBytes {
param($size)
If ($size -lt 1MB) {
$drive_size = $size / 1KB
$drive_size = [Math]::Round($drive_size, 2)
[string]$drive_size + ' KB'
}elseif ($size -lt 1GB){
$drive_size = $size / 1MB
$drive_size = [Math]::Round($drive_size, 2)
[string]$drive_size + ' MB'
}ElseIf ($size -lt 1TB){
$drive_size = $size / 1GB
$drive_size = [Math]::Round($drive_size, 2)
[string]$drive_size + ' GB'
}Else{
$drive_size = $size / 1TB
$drive_size = [Math]::Round($drive_size, 2)
[string]$drive_size + ' TB'
# Create the header and footer contents of the html page for output
$html_header = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Server Drive Space</title>
<style type="text/css">
.serverName { text-align:center; font-family:"' + $server_name_font + '"; font-size:' + $server_name_font_size + `
'; font-weight:bold; background-color: ' + $server_name_bg_color + '; border: 1px solid black; width: 150px; }
.headings { text-align:center; font-family:"' + $heading_font + '"; font-size:' + $heading_font_size + `
'; font-weight:bold; background-color: ' + $heading_name_bg_color + '; border: 1px solid black; width: 150px; }
.data { font-family:"' + $data_font + '"; font-size:' + $data_font_size + '; border: 1px solid black; width: 150px; }
#dataTable { border: 1px solid black; border-collapse:collapse; }
body { background-color: ' + $background_color + '; }
#legend { border: 1px solid black; ; right:500px; top:10px; }
</style>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

</script>
</head>
<body>'
$html_footer = '</body>
</html>'
# Start to create the reports file
Add-Content $html_file $html_header
# Retrieve the contents of the server.txt file, this file should contain either the
# ip address or the host name of the machine on a single line. Loop through the file
# and get the drive information.
Get-Content $server_file |`
ForEach-Object {
# Get the hostname of the machine
$hostname = Get-WmiObject -Impersonation Impersonate -ComputerName $_ -Query "SELECT Name From Win32_ComputerSystem"
$name = $hostname.Name.ToUpper()
Add-Content $html_file ('<Table id="dataTable"><tr><td colspan="3" class="serverName">' + $name + '</td></tr>
<tr><td class="headings">Drive Letter</td><td class="headings">Total Size</td><td class="headings">Free Space</td></tr>')
# Get the drives of the server
$drives = Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -Filter "drivetype=3" -ComputerName $_ -Impersonation Impersonate
# Now that I have all the drives, loop through and add to report
ForEach ($drive in $drives) {
$space_color = ""
$free_space = $drive.FreeSpace
$total_space = $drive.Size
$percentage_free = $free_space / $total_space
$percentage_free = $percentage_free * 100
If ($percentage_free -le 5) {
$space_color = $very_low_space
}elseif ($percentage_free -le 10) {
$space_color = $low_space
}elseif ($percentage_free -le 15) {
$space_color = $medium_space
Add-Content $html_file ('<tr><td class="data">' + $drive.deviceid + '</td><td class="data">' + (ConvertBytes $drive.size) + `
'</td><td class="data" bgcolor="' + $space_color + '">' + (ConvertBytes $drive.FreeSpace) + '</td></tr>')
# Close the table
Add-Content $html_file ('</table></br><div id="legend">
<Table><tr><td style="font-size:12px">Less then or equal to 5 % free space</td><td bgcolor="' + $very_low_space + '" width="10px"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size:12px">Less then or equal to 10 % free space</td><td bgcolor="' + $low_space + '" width="10px"></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size:12px">Less then or equal to 15 % free space</td><td bgcolor="' + $medium_space + '" width="10px"></td></tr>
</table></div>')
# End the reports file
Add-Content $html_file $html_footer
# Email the file
$mail = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
$att = new-object Net.Mail.Attachment($html_file)
$mail.From = $from_address
$mail.To.Add($to_address)
$mail.Subject = "Server Diskspace $date"
$mail.Body = "The diskspace report file is attached."
$mail.Attachments.Add($att)
$smtp = New-Object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient($email_gateway)
#$smtp.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($smtp_user,$smtp_pass)
$smtp.Send($mail)
$att.Dispose()
# Delete the file
Remove-Item $html_file
Regards,
Denis Cooper
MCITP EA - MCT
Help keep the forums tidy, if this has helped please mark it as an answer
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Error: Index Build Failed - Insufficient Disk Space

I am unable to create a full-text index for a set of PDF files (Full Text Index with Catalog function). The initial build worked a few months ago, but all attempts at a rebuild are met with the following:
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link: www.speedbit.com

Prevent automatic removal of the Spotlight index due to low disk space

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