Stop Spotlight from Indexing drive

I recently purchased a new external drive - partitioned it into 3 partitions but Spotlight is being very insistent on trying to index one of those partitions that doesn't even have anything on. It says "Indexing My External Drive" and has been continuning to do this forever. To the point where I decided to repartiton the drive but no, it still wants to Index nothing! I've also added the drive to the Privacy setting in Spotlight Prefs.
Driving me nuts! Any help would be much appreciated.

Georgy
Keep in mind that the index is stored on the drive that is being indexed. As such, indexing an external volume does not affect your main drive.
Remember also, that when you do update your external drive, the indexing only updates the changes made to the drive on the fly, provided of course if it is mounted and allowed to do so.
My suggestion, let Spotlight index the drive. Particularly if you are using it as a backup. Once in place, updating the index and searching is extremely fast.
Be careful however, of using third-party solutions. Some will affect Spotlight's normal indexing process and their preferences have to be changed for Spotlight to work.

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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

How to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives

Is there any way to stop Spotlight from indexing backup drives?
Thanks

Yes, in Spotlight preferences there is an option to do this. I'm not on my Mac now, so I forget exactly where in Spotlight preferences it is. I believe there is a second tab that you have to click on, then click the "+" sign to add items to Exclude. Just add your backup drive.

How do I stop spotlight from indexing files?

I only have 2GB of RAM and Indexing files really slows down my computer, so much that i can hardly operate the computer. Is there any way that i can stop Spotlight from indexing my files automatically or have it index every week instead of every day?

It shouldn't be running so much that it slows down the computer. It will run for a while, initially, but after that it should index files on the fly as they are added. I suppose if you dumped a ton of files onto the hard drive, it would spend a while indexing them.
You might try restarting the index as it might be corrupt. To do so, go to the Privacy tab in Spotlight. Add your hard drive to the list. Wait about 10 seconds, then remove your hard drive. Don't do that while you're working, though.

How do you stop Spotlight from indexing other OSX partition?

I have my harddrive partioned, on one partition is osx 10.8, on the other is osx 10.9. I'd like to stop Spotlight on 10.8 from indexing 10.9's partition. If 10.8 is booted and I set Spotlight to not index 10.9's "macintosh HD" via systemprefs/spotlight it has the unfortunate consequence of carring over, so when I boot into my 10.9 partition Spotlight won't be indexing - which is not what I want.
Anyone able to shed some light on this one?

Unfortunately, when you add a drive in the Privacy field, a small file is created on that drive which tells Spotlight not to index it. So both 10.8 and 10.9 see that file and won't index, no matter which OS you did the Privacy change from. Also then, of course, if you remove the drive from Privacy, both will index it.
At least that's how it's worked for me. I haven't been able to get the same drive to behave differently for multiple startup partitions.

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.

Stop spotlight from searching CDs

Hey, quick question!
Is there any way to stop spotlight from trying to search on CDs? I keep my Call of Duty 2 cd in my drive a lot, and it's really annoying to have to wait for my drive to spin up for every spotlight search I do.
- Walt

Hello Walt.
I don't believe Spotlight is searching the CD unless you have requested Spotlight to do so.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301533
Mounted CDs or DVDs are not included items in the Spotlight preferences Search Results.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2160.html
Copied from this link.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html
Spotlight will begin indexing any volume as soon as it is mounted, with certain exceptions: CDs, DVDs, and network-attached or shared volumes are not indexed when mounted.

How do I stop spotlight from returning .r and .h files

how do I stop spotlight from returning .r and .h files?

Hello jtenny,
Welcome to the Discussions.
I had a similar problem with Safari opening .pdf files. It went away when I went into the following folder: Your Home Folder/Library/Internet Plug-ins, and dragged out any files that looked as if they might make a difference, just one at a time, onto the Desktop. (N.B. I did not Trash them; and if removal made no difference, I replaced the file into the Plug-ins folder.) You will have to restart Safari on each occasion; and on a couple of occasions I found that re-setting Safari (Safari Menu) was necessary to give the application a start-from-scratch with each download attempt.
That's a somewhat makeshift way of approaching it; but provided you don't trash the plugins, and provided you restore those that make no difference, it can't do any harm -- within my experience anyway.
All good wishes from Ireland
Martin
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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.

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.

Keep Spotlight From Indexing Removable Drives

Is there a way to get Spotlight to not index e.g. any removable drive? For example, is there a plist that I could edit? I would have tried dragging /Volumes into the Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy pane, but of course, Mac OS doesn't let you view /Volumes in Finder, and so such a dragging is impossible.
Thanks!

Thanks. That's not as proactive as what I'm looking for, however. That solution has a chicken and egg problem where you mount the device, and Spotlight starts to index it before you get a chance to create the .metadataneverindex file...
In the meantime, I seem to have figured out how to add /Volumes to the list of excluded volumes, but it turns out that's an idea which could be added to the list of things that do not work.

How to stop importing from usb drive going into root ITMS directory

First time I imported, everything was fine. I was trying to get rid of some duplicates and got rid of one of the main subdirectories (I had "Itunes Music" folder with two main subdirectories, let's call them "Laptop" and "Desktop." I noticed I had many duplicate artists from these, so I deleted the "Laptop" directory. Naturally, all these showed up with asterisks on iTunes. With no easy way to delete them all (can't sort based on asterisk, apparently), I removed EVERYTHING from my Library and attempted to copy over from the USB drive again. This time, the contents of "Laptop" went into the root "iTunes Music" folder (so there were now ~50+ folders including the "Desktop."
This isn't working for me, since my objective is to get rid of the duplicate work (duplicate tracks I can somewhat stomach, but I also have some duplicate "Artists" which is driving me crazy). I removed everything from the library, deleting it all (~30+GB) and deleted all of the subdirectories from the iTunes Music folder.
When I went to reimport it all again. I dragged the "Laptop" folder from Finder on the USB drive into the iTunes Music directory again (as I did the first time), recreated the and everything continues to populate the top iTunes music folder. Is there any way to stop this? I want the "Laptop" folder to stay in it's subdirectory structure distinct and separate from the "Desktop" folder so I can ensure I am not unnecessarily increasing my structure.
One easy (though extremely tedious) alternative could be to import the folders one at a time... but I'd really like to avoid that. But for my first mistake, this wouldn't have been an issue. I haven't changed any settings on iTunes, so please advise!

I have duplicate (different) stuff on the laptop versus desktop but some unique to each (and all kinda scrambled up). I first started importing on my old G3 ibook. It was slower and chugged harder and some are at really low bitrate, for example, and also lack album art. My XP desktop was made for gaming and is much more powerful, so I always did high bitrate and was much more careful to do all the album art, etc.
Now I'm trying to consolidate it all on my new MBP... Mostly, though, it's a mess and I've been putting this off for years and it's mostly my fault. My biggest gripe is the large number of duplicate tracks. I can live with these when they're from different albums (compilations mostly), but not when one is a lower bit. I imagine I'm gonna be doing it the hard way, one album/artist at a time...

Stop spotlight from searching previous systems

After installing Lion over 10.6.8 spotlight provides search results for applications from 10.6.8. How do I prevent this?

Try re-setting Spotlight

Confirmation on How to Stop Spotlight Indexing an External Hard Drive

Hello everyone,
I know there are a number of posts on this but I just want to confirm: Can I stop Spotlight from indexing my external FireWire hard drive by adding its name to the Privacy pane in Spotlight's preferences when the drive is mounted? (I'm a little low on internal hard disk space on my iBook so I want to keep the index as lean as possible.)

Georgy
Keep in mind that the index is stored on the drive that is being indexed. As such, indexing an external volume does not affect your main drive.
Remember also, that when you do update your external drive, the indexing only updates the changes made to the drive on the fly, provided of course if it is mounted and allowed to do so.
My suggestion, let Spotlight index the drive. Particularly if you are using it as a backup. Once in place, updating the index and searching is extremely fast.
Be careful however, of using third-party solutions. Some will affect Spotlight's normal indexing process and their preferences have to be changed for Spotlight to work.

Stop spotlight indexing mail

Hi,
This seems like a fairly simple thing to do but I can't figure out how to do it. I would like to stop spotlight from indexing all my mail. How do I do it?
cheers
Matt

in system preferences, there is a spotlight preference pane. in it, you can tell spotlight what to index and what to ignore.

Stop Spotlight from Indexing drive

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