10.5: Spotlight and the Time Machine disk
After much experimentation with the various known techniques and applications for turning off Spotlight indexing on a volume, I have concluded that it is not possible to convince OS X (Leopard) to not index the volume being used for Time Machine. This is true even if Time Machine is set to Off, its volume is added to Spotlight's Privacy list, and the volume has a .metadata_never_index file at its root. The volume I was using is a partition on an external FireWire 800 drive dedicated to Time Machine. My guess is that Apple enforces indexing on the Time Machine volume to facilitate searching backups, as suggested in this knowledge base document. But there are many ways to search, I don't use Spotlight all that much, the volume is 400GB, and I really just don't want Spotlight chewing on it -- especially when there's...
published on Tuesday, the 29. July 2008, macosxhints
10.4: Disable Spotlight on a FAT32 external drive
After scouring the internet for several hours trying to figure out how to stop Spotlight from indexing my external 300GB FAT32 drive (which I don't even need indexed and was causing slowdowns), the one thing that worked for me was a somewhat obscure thing I found on a couple of sites. By putting an empty file named .metadata_never_index file at the top level directory of the volume, it has stopped searching the volume. To create the file, I just issued the command touch .metadata_never_index from Terminal (make sure you're at the top-level of the volume, obviously). This worked for my FAT32 volume; an NTFS partition may require a different solution. Here are the things that did not work for me: Spotlight preferences: adding to Privacy list does not work for FAT32 volumes (or NTFS volumes). mdutil -i off /path/to/volume/: Seems...
published on Wednesday, the 16. August 2006, macosxhints