I’m an idiot… no really… I’ve spent the last hour researching hacks to exclude my newly acquired 1TB Firewire drive from being indexed and searched from Spotlight. We all know how big of a resource hog spotlight is so any little bit helps in my opinion. This 1 TB drive is acting as my backup drive, so I really don’t need all the files from my root drive (Mac OS X) being intertwined with the exact same files on the external firewire drive. That would get messy, and probably really fubar my backup, especially if I started working on code on my backup instead of the actual OS drive. Uggh, I can just hear the cursing I’d be doing now… not fun.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand! So, I was working with a hack provided by macosxhints, when I decided that I should probably check out the spotlight preferences in my system preferences. There it was… a Privacy tab, and some text telling me that “Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations: Click the Add button, or drag a folder or disk into the list below”.
Can it really be that easy? You know damn right it can… we’re on Mac’s here… not M$’s P.O.S Vista… ZING.  As an aside, this is why I love Apple. They make things so painlessly easy that you often overlook the obvious.
Now I have my backup drives being excluded from my spotlight searchs, my backups are safe, my system can free up some resources life is good.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:27 am
So now what do you do if you drag your external and its enclosing backup.backupdb into spotlights privacy tab and it STILL indexes your external on startup..?
March 20th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Hmm… did you delete the spotlight index files off of your main drives that you want unindexed??
August 12th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
What I want is a checkbox that says “don’t index external drives”. I never want to index external drives because this is a laptop, and therefore external drives are always only connected on a temporary basis. Most of them are backup drives or media storage, there’s no use in indexing them at all.
I don’t think it’s “easy” to remember to put a new external drive in the privacy tab in spotlight every time – it’s more Microsoft-ish in that it’s “too smart” and doing things behind your back that you don’t want it to do. As in I just plugged in a USB drive, and wanted to copy some media files to it. It was incredibly slow, and CPU usage shot up too. Why? Because spotlight decided to index the drive, stealing I/O bandwidth and CPU time from me, and generally preventing me from doing what I want to do. Until I saw the spotlight indicator and put it in the privacy tab.
The only reason I can think of why somebody might want to index their external hard drive is when the external drive acts as a data repository that’s pretty much always connected to the computer, e.g. on a desktop Mac. It should be the exception rather than the rule.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
I agree it should be off by default. :)
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December 17th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
This doesn't workfor me for Spotlight forgets when my USB drives are unplugged :(
December 19th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Echoing Arnold, when you unplug/replug your drive, Spotlight's privacy tab will have forgotten, and it'll get right to work indexing it for you.
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March 19th, 2009 at 7:48 am
There is nothing wrong with Vista, really. Have you tried to use it?
And you really must give Windows 7, or even better, Windows Server 2008 a go. You'd forget Apple.
And yes, ofcourse, Ubuntu. Beats Apple.
Don't get me wrong. OS X is great. But Apple as a company is worse than Microsoft.
December 6th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Hello, just add an empty file named .metadata_never_index at the root of your external drives.
December 6th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Thanks for the tip, gonna try it out right now. :)
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January 17th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Most of the time Apple gets it right. And although I completely disagree with Ryan, every once in a while, Apple does mess things up. This is one of those cases. A nobrainer.
How about like when you quickly had to copy something off a friend’s usb thumb drive, and he’s in a real hurry, but you can’t eject his drive because spotlight has to finish indexing it first.
Now imagine you almost had this guy convinced he should switch to mac, and now this happens. Back to square one.
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes life difficult for wackos like us, who are constantly trying to convince the rest of the world that Apple is better than M$.
January 17th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Excellent points Shiraz. I wouldn’t mind a popup that asks if usb devices should be indexed. Let me rephrase that, I wouldn’t mind getting a popup the first time a USB device is EVER attached. Then it could just keep track of my decision. If you wanted to add a drive you could then be able to add it to spotlight indexing in the preferences. That would solve a ton of problems for me.
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February 19th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
A least Windows doesn’t leave tons of crap files on thumb drives. It just puts the files on you tell it to. There is no way, as far as I have found, to keep these Spotlight, etc files off a thumb drive–and Mac doesn’t even tell you they are there! As mentioned above, you can tell Spotlight to ignore the thumb drive, but as soon as it is unplugged, Spotlight resets. Pretty lame. Mac is, generally, better, I agree, but they are way behind on a lot of needed improvements.
March 19th, 2010 at 4:36 am
I agree totally…in this respect OS-X is a duck, it is such a pain in the backside. if I want a B**Fy spotlight Index of a 64 Gb USB stick then I ‘ll ask for it. This is worse than many Windows bugs. At least in Windows you can turn off many of the annoying ‘Are you sure?’ before dong anything features