“Dragging a volume into Spotlight’s settings pane” doesn’t tell Spotlight about the volume, it tells the volume about Spotlight, in effect – the information that Spotlight is to leave it be is stored on the volume itself. Re-format it, and spotlight will be right back in there until you drag it to the preferences thing all over again. Since frequent re-formatting of flash drives is not only common, but actually quite a good idea, this is unacceptable.

It’s also unacceptable that my friend has to do something to THEIR external drive, flashcard, whatever, to prevent my computer writing crap all over it the moment I plug it in.

I want a “no removable drives unless I explicitly enable indexing on them” option for Spotlight. I was hoping they’d have fixed this in Leopard or Snow Leopard. The “choice” desperately to drag any and every new volume you mount into Spotlight’s preference pane before Spotlight can grind your system to a halt trying to index millions of files on a slow flash drive is just wrong, broken, bad design, not worthy of Apple.

(I also want a metadata-only option on Spotlight (no contents), but that’s another story).

Useful hint:

Apple KNOW it’s a Bad Idea for flash drives, or they wouldn’t have built in the little exception I’ve noticed that stops the average consumer noticing this “feature”, as follows:

IF your removable media has a DCIM folder in its root (i.e. it looks like a flashcard from a camera) then Spotlight leaves it alone. You still get .Trashes, ._.Trash, .fseventsd and so on, but at least you don’t get Spotlight trying to open every file on it at once for a look.

You can also get Spotlight to leave a volume alone by creating any file called .metadata_never_index in the root of your removable drive, e.g. by doing “touch /Volumes/FLASHDRIVENAME/.metadata_never_index – I’m guessing this works in any folder of volume.

But you shouldn’t have to. You should be able to put a drive in without having first to have edited its contents using some friendlier OS to place these magic incantations which tell Spotlight to back off.

Spotlight’s default behaviour is bad design, period.

As a work-around, I propose intercepting the mount operation e.g by replacing /sbin/mount with some script which completes the mount then places a .metadata_never_index file on any unrecognised volume which is mounted read/write. Will post again with script(s) when I get around to trying this out, if it works. Ideally, I guess a corresponding umount script should clean up any other Apple metadata and sync before unmounting.

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$.

Here’s the link: http://www.thejackol.com/2009/03/19/exclude-spotlight-osx-external-drives-folders/

I was also getting drive unexpectedly disconnected errors when spotlight tried to index the external, but this fixed all my issues.

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.

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.