Spotlight keeps indexing external set to Privacy

After completing a SuperDuper backup Spotlight started indexing all of its contents ('30 hours remaining...'). To stop this I dragged the backup image into Spotlight's Privacy panel, but to no avail. To stop the indexing I had to do a force unmount of the external drive. Somewhere else I read that as soon as the drive is dragged into the Privacy folder Spotlight's indexing stops. Is this how it is supposed to work?
Thanks in advance

Well, this time immediately after SuperDuper started doing its backup operations I went to Spotlight's Privacy panel and added the SuperDuper image there, and Spotlight didn't index anything. So I suppose this is the way it should work.

Similar Messages

Spotlight keeps indexing in snow leopard

Spotlight keeps indexing for the last 2 weeks. I tsometimes has 45 mins till finishing, but when I check later, it still indexing without a estimate of time when it will finish. I have selected my ext. HD not to be index, but it still states it indexing my main HD. What can I do? I'm using 10.6.8. Also have 4 USB, 2 tb ext HD attachded. 2-to a usb hub and 2 -to the back of the imac. What can I do?
Austin

I had the same problems with spotlight that kept indexing. I solved them by using the following commands in the Terminal:
$ sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*
$ sudo mdutil -i on -E /
As explained here:
http://guidovanoorschot.nl/how-to-fix-spotlight-when-it-keeps-indexing-n-mac-os- x-lion/

Spotlight keeps indexing

hi,
The Time Capsule at work stopped taking backups of my machine on July,1. For my colleagues, it still works fine. I also noticed spotlight keeps trying to index the disk.
As a solution I removed the latest backup (indicated with 'inProgress' and I verified the disk with disk utility. I took 3 days, but mentioned no errors. I tried a couple of times to restart the backup, and now it finally seems to work again. Backup works (but very slow), however spotlight keeps indexing.
I already tried restarting the spotlight server, but it does not help. I tried other suggestions on the web but nothing seems to work...

See #D2 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

How can I stop Spotlight from indexing external drives?

I work in an environment where we plugin several different costumer harddrives all day long as part of our working process. Often only to extract one file from a given drive. Therefore its annoying that Spotlight automatically starts indexing these drives, because it slows down everthing, but also because our windows costumers suddenly see these weird mac files on their drives, that are invisible to the macuser. The Privacy setting is not of much use, as its impossible to add oru costumers drives to the list - we simply don't know the drive until we see it.
How can spotlight stop indexing?

The Privacy option is okay for private users, but at work we receive alot of harddrives from costumers and we simply cannot spend the extra time waiting for a drive to be indexed every time it is connected. That drive may never be connected again as it belongs to a costumer, and it is impossible for us to add drives to the Privacy pane, because we do not know they exist before we see them infront of us. The ption to disable all external drives from being indexed would be great. Or that the indexing can be stopped in the spotlight menu, or that the indexing will not start until 10 minutes after the drive has been mounted - and only if the drive is inactive.

Spotlight keeps "indexing iPhone" since upgrading to Mavericks

The Spotlight indexed my MacBook Pro's hard drive once after upgrading to Mavericks. That is fine. But when I went to Spotlight to search for something after that, I often find that the Spotlight was "indexing iPhone". It didn't take long for it to finish but is it normal? And what is indexing iPhone anyway?

This is getting annoying!
The computer goes to sleep. I can wake it by pressing a key on the wireless keyboard. It thinks for a while. It asks me for the password. I can't enter the password because during that time the keyboard has disconnected from the computer. I have no choice but to hard restart the computer.
Any and all ideas welcome. Thanks in advance.

Keeping Spotlight from indexing external disks

Is there a way to exclude ALL external disks from being indexed by Spotlight? I don't need the indexing and it just slows everything down. I know about the list of exclusions, but a disk seems to have to be attached before one can exclude it. Can't one just keep it from indexing anything one might attach?

Vaughan Schlepp wrote:
Can't one just keep it from indexing anything one might attach?
I don't think there is a simple (if any) way to do this, but note that the OS does somehow keep track of excluded disks once they are excluded, even when they don't show up in the list because the drives are not currently mounted.
Perhaps there is some way to edit that list before mounting new drives, but I don't know where the list is or how to edit it.

Prevent Spotlight From Indexing External Drive?

Is there a way to prevent spotlight from commencing to index an external drive immediately upon connection?

As Király says, once you have put the volume into System Preferences > Spotlight > 'Privacy' tab it will remain there - with one caveat, though...
Bear in mind that if you ever erase that volume it will have gone from the 'Privacy' tab (because erasing gives the volume a new UUID) and will need to be replaced.
NB: It's not actually the drive that goes into the 'Privacy' tab - it's the volume(s) on the drive.

Mail search not working + Spotlight keeps indexing

I have an old problem that has resurfaced after creating a new user on my Mac. Mail search brings no results and Spotlight is constantly indexing - day in, day out. It never seems to get there. I tried turning my hard drive to private in Spotlight settings and then taking it out. Previously Spotlight seemed to get bogged down with external drives now it's stuck indexing my Mac.
Any advice? Is there a way I get unstick this?

I can't believe that Apple have STILL not sorted this out. I haven't created a new user (so it's nothing to do with that), but Mail.app won't find anything when searching "Entire Message" in the current Mailbox or in "All Mailboxes". This has been ongoing since Leopard was first released, and we are now up to 10.5.8 without this being fixed.
Here are some of the reports:
Topic : Spotlight does not search Mail messages
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1366101
Topic : Search "Entire Message" returns "0 Found" in mailboxes
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1341832
Topic : Spotlight died on me
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1226645
Topic : I can't search through my inbox!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387827
Topic : Leopard's Spotlight doesn't search Mail messages
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1219030
Topic : Mail Search
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1347387
Topic : Mail Won't Search
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1204827
Topic : Search does not work
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1254966
Topic : Mail search not working
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1289253
Topic : Unable to Search Mailbox
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1232504
Topic : Why is Search in Mail.app busted?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1403758
Topic : Mail Search comes up empty
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1378473
Topic : Search "Entire Message" not working with Smart Mailboxes?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6548355&#6548355
Topic : Mail searches yield no results! Smart mailboxes also yield no results!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1395508
Topic : 10.5.2 Mail.app search still not working (Entire Message)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1389466

Spotlight keeps indexing a volume even though it's on the "Prevent List"

Picture is worth a thousand words:
Basically my volume, Lucifer, is indexed time and time again by Spotlight even though I have placed the volume on the list of volume sto be ignored by Spotlight. Teh other volume, Media, is never indexed, but Lucifer is always being indexed and this is extremely annoying as it slows down the machine. I have removed Luciefr from the list and added it again and it does not work.
Looks like a bug to me.

Run this command in the Terminal app:
*mdutil -s /Volumes/*
It should return at least these:
/Volumes/Lucifer:
+Indexing and searching disabled.+
/Volumes/Media:
+Indexing and searching disabled.+
If not, run this one to disable indexing on Lucifer:
*sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Lucifer*
at the Password: prompt, enter your admin password carefully, since it doesn't display on the screen, and hit the return key. Enter the first command to ensure you get that it's disabled for Lucifer.

Spotlight keeps reindexing due to motion5 ?

The last few days spotlights keeps indexing and hangs for hours (About 172 hours remaining for indexing my internal drive at one time).
Today i did everything (terminal, onyx, spotless etc) to clean things and that seemed to fix the problem. But now the indexing process hangs again (this time only 3 hours remaining, but it stays that way for many hours).
So i did a search for 'mdworker' in console and these errors came up quite a few times
mdworker32[622]
Error Error loading /Applications/Motion.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Motion Spotlight.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Motion Spotlight: dlopen(/Applications/Motion.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Motion Spotlight.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Motion Spotlight, 262): no suitable image found.
Did find:/Applications/Motion.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Motion Spotlight.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/Motion Spotlight: mach-o, but wrong architecture
mdworker[1214] Warning CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.
I'm using a macbook pro (2011) running 10.6.8
Any ideas what's wrong or can be done do fix this?
[s]

1- Run Disk Utility to "Repair" all drives. Don't bother with "Verify", waset of time.
2- Run Disk Warrior to rebuild directories on all drives.
It's likely a failiing drive if those two don't work.

Spotlight Indexing External Drives

I have been waiting about a week for Spotlight to Index my external drives, but the magnifying glass continually only shows "Estimating indexing time..." for each drive and never seems to go any further.
Any clues?
Thanks.
-Aaron

Aaron Welch wrote:
I have been waiting about a week for Spotlight to Index my external drives, but the magnifying glass continually only shows "Estimating indexing time..." for each drive and never seems to go any further.
It clearly doesn't like something on one of them. I'd start by excluding all of them from indexing, via System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, then running +*Repair Disk+* (not permissions) on each one, via Disk Utility, in your Applications/Utilities folder.
Then remove the exclusions, one at a time. If one hangs like that again, you'll at least know which one it is, and can try a process of elimination by excluding folders on that drive.

Spotlight trouble indexing mail in Lion

Having a terrible time with Spotlight perpetually indexing mail.
system log shows
Jul 11 17:01:26 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: [Assigning new unique identifiers to all messages]
Jul 11 17:01:26: --- last message repeated 249 times ---
and of course All messages shows every one of those.
also plenty of messages like
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unterminated mailbox: [email protected].
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unexpected characters at end of address: :;>
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unterminated mailbox: [email protected].
Jul 11 17:03:02 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Unexpected characters at end of address: :;>
Jul 11 17:03:04 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Missing parameter value: NAME
Jul 11 17:03:04 xxxxx com.apple.mdworker.lsb.0[2660]: %Missing parameter value: FILENAME
-- those seem to be ridiculous errors for Spotlight -- if it can't figure out how to parse some of the info, it should ignore that info.
This continues until the disk cache gets totally overloaded, and the machine slows down.
Only help is to reboot.
I have tried turning off spotlight indexing to delete the spotlight cache (and used Cocktail to delete the Spotlight index)
That was no help.
Also rebuilt all of the mailboxes within the Mail program.
Then turned indexing off and back on.
Still no help.
Just tried deleting a couple of old mailbox entries in ~/Library/Mail
There was an old Unix mailbox there from an early version of OS X, and another one that I could not identify, and should have been deleted long ago.
I know I can turn off the indexing for mail, but that is one area where I would like to keep it.
I haven't tried a reboot since the latest deletes, but seeing the same messages flowing in the logs does not give me much hope.
It may be possible that 1 or 2 bad emails are causing all the trouble, but I am at a loss to find them.
Have 18 different accounts that are active ( I do web work so have webmaster, and other accounts on a number of servers).
Those are a mix of IMAP and POP.
INBOX total is usually kept around 100 emails - almost never goes above 200 unless I am away for an extended time.
Most mail ends up in folders ON MY MAC.
Largest of those has about 1500 messages.
Do not have extra folders on the servers with any of the IMAP accounts.
It is about time I archive some of the older messages, and that may help, but it will take me a while to get to that, and then flush the messages.
Problem occurred after update to Lion.
Did not seem to have the problem with Snow Leopard
Anyone have any other ideas?

I thought I had posted a follow up to this posting, but I guess not.
Soooo, here it is.
The problem was not with Apple Mail.app as it seemed, but actually with Mailsmith.app.
I use it for a number of mail accounts that I want to handle separately from my other mail accounts.
Within that application there is a Spotlight helper/worker
-- /Applications/Mailsmith.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/MailsmithImporter.mdimporter/ --
That is what was causing the problem for me.
Some users remove that section from the application, or do as I did -
Set the folders for Mailsmith mail for privacy in Spotlight.
Note: also set any backups of the Mailsmith mail for privacy also.
I filed a bug report with Mailsmith, but it is still open.
There appear to be a lot of issues with their Spotlight helper through the various versions of OS and Mailsmith.
see their discussion groups -
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/mailsmith-talk/spotlight$ 20indexing
The problem may be with certain emails, attachments, or addresses, don't know.
I am happy excluding that mail from Spotlight, and now my logs don't overflow and crash, the machine goes into deep sleep, and runs much cooler.

How I solved my Spotlight+ Mail indexing problem

OK, so I thought I would post my solution to a stubborn indexing problem, for people who may have the same issue (and it does seem many people do).
Problem: Spotlight index was unreliable. In particular, Spotlight was terrible at indexing mail. It could not find the messages by content that it would find by searching the "from" field, nor could it find those reliably. Unusable.
What DID NOT work:
-- adding and removing any folder whatsoever in the Privacy preferences of Spotlight. The index would rebuild, but with the same problems.
-- doing this via terminal (e.g, using sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/MyHardDisk)
-- using Onyx
-- using Spotless
-- simply reinstalling the system
-- manually modifying the plist files inside the .spotlight folder to add and remove the folders that would not get indexed.
What DID work:
-- first, I reinstalled the system. That's not such a big deal. Upgrade up to 10.4.6
-- then, I authorized the root user (that's probably not necessary) (this, you do by using Netinfo manager)
-- Then, I deactivated the index (via terminal:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/MyHardDisk
-- now the tricky part. This concerns Mail, in particular.
I have a very complex mail folder (tens of thousands of messages). I noticed that inside each mail folder, I had two things that were not supposed to be there
1. a copy of each folder.mbox which was empty, but with the same name without the extension .mbox. This is probably something that was created while importing mail from Panther to Tiger, for what I can tell.
2. Most importantly, a file named ".index.ready". This also, apparently, was an old legacy coming from Panther. I suspect this was the main problem for the lack of indexing in Mail.
Ok, so... I deleted these folders and files. If you have a complex structure of subfolders, you can delete the files with an Unix command by first cd to your mail folder, and then use
find . -name \.index.r* -ok rm {} \;
which will ask you confirmation before deleting each file.
It was faster to remove the empty subfolders by hand, as they all had different names.
-- Ok, at this point, I erased entirely the .Spotlight-V100 directory which stays at the root of your computer. You can do it with a rmdir command from the terminal or, as I did, you can login as root (remember, we activated root), use a utility that allows you to see hidden files (e.g., Tinkertool), and move it manually to the trash folder.
Then I emptied the trash. For superstition, I restarted, and let the index be built again (that took about 5 hours in my computer, for an HD with about 60 gb occupied on it).
Now everything seems to work perfectly fine. I don't know whether this procedure can be shortened, but I do know that nothing else worked for me. I thought I would post it here as I spent sooo much time to solve this problem, and furthermore, I found that none of the suggested solutions would work.
OK, your responsibility to do it, if you want to do it. Hope nobody needs to!
Best to you all,
l.
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lucabo! Using ideas from your post, I also (at least for now) solved my Mail indexing problem. One day (not even after an upgrade) Mail just quit finding messages by content, even when I had open a message with that content!
What I did:
-- In System Preferences, told Spotlight to index only Mail (I just use grep from a Terminal window for everything else!)
-- Ensured Mail app wasn't running
-- Backed up my Library/Mail folder to an external disk
-- Turned off indexing via Terminal (after sudo sh), with
mdutil -i off /Volumes/MyHardDisk
-- Deleted old files in my mailboxes (inside the whatever.mbox folders):
.index.ready
mbox
tableofcontents
content_index
It was clear that mbox, tableofcontents, and content_index were left over from a previous version of mail - they hadn't been accessed since I upgraded.
Note that I didn't delete the whatever.mbox folders (just the plain mbox file inside)!
-- Deleted (in Terminal) the .Spotlight-V100 in the root directory
-- Restarted my Mac. The indexing started itself. Since I had it set up to index only Mail, it took about 3-ish hours to finish (I have 100s of 1000s of emails in thousands of folders).
After the indexing finished, all the test searches that I tried worked. From now on I will always be suspicious if search doesn't find anything!
Also, I just checked - using the Spotlight field on the menu bar now works better too. When the Mail search problem showed up, I tried using the Spotlight field and the Spotlight window, but they would just flash up a few items, remove the list, over and over, sometimes with the beachball, then finally settle to an empty list. Now the Spotlight field seems to work.
I infer that the Spotlight index gets corrupted, and that the Spotlight code doesn't notice that it's reading junk from the index...
BTW, about the same time that search quit working, some emails in my Inboxes got highlighted with a dark brown background color. Have no idea why. They aren't marked as Junk (the junk messages have the text in the usual lighter brown). But, when I select a message with the dark brown highlight, mark it as junk, then mark it as not junk, the dark brown highlight goes away. On some occasions, just quitting Mail and restarting makes the dark brown highlights go away - but not always. Sigh... at least it's not a show stopper, even if it is ugly!
Thanks again, Lucabo, for your post!
Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Stop Spotlight from indexing new drives

I know how to block a drive in Spotlight's privacy settings.
What I'm looking for is a way to stop Spotlight from indexing a drive every time I plug one in. I'm often connecting external drives for work & spotlight immediatley starts to index & I go in and add it to the blocked list in Spotlight> Privacy.
Is there a way to just have Spotlight NOT try to index a new drive?

Sorry, I missed that part.
Try this, add this file to the external drive.
touch /Volumes/name of the external drive/.metadata_never_index
This will add a file called .metadata_never_index to the root of that drive.
You can also disable spotlight
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To re-enable Spotlight:
sudo mdutil -a -i on

Cannot disable spotlight - endlessly indexing

Hello all,
I cannot disable spotlight - it is endlessly indexing. I have dropped the main drive into Provacy under Spotlight. I have dropped my other 3 drives there as well. I have taken them out and reurned them many times - no change. I repaired disk permissions many times - no change. I downloaded and installed the 10.6.8 Combo update - no change. It keeps indexing and says: Indexing _____________'s Mac Pro. And the estimated time is not there - just that barber pole. And I believe it is affecting my applications - I am having major problems with Avid's Pro Tools 9.0.6.
Is there anything else that I can try? I do own Spotless but I stopped using it over a year ago - it didn't seem to do anything more than what I could do using the Privacy option. It it possible that Spotless might be able to do something that I cannot?
Any ideas would be welcome.

Maybe some file is corrupt in such a way to hang up spotlight. Is it possible for you to run with just your boot drive with the other 3 drives physically removed from the machine? See if it loops that way. If so something may be going on with the boot drive. If not, start adding the removed drives back one-by-one until it gets caught in the loop again.
If this method works at least you can narrow it down to a specific drive. Of course that won't tell you what the problem is on that drive but you at least have a single drive to concentrate on as opposed to 4 of them.
Since you already tried adding these drives to privacy I am not going to suggest the mdutil command to erase the indices (-E) or flag for no indices (-i). I don't think it will change anything and of course won't resolve why it is looping.
Also note that this problem is not unique. Look at the right side of this page for More Like This.
Related articles:
Turning Off Spotlight
The X Lab: Spotlight Tips

Spotlight keeps indexing external set to Privacy

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