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I have an external hard drive connected to my Macbook Pro that I always leave on. When I use spotlight to search for something, it always searches this drive. I don't want it to do this because usually the drive is in standby mode, so it takes a while to power up when I use spotlight to find something, and usually what I'm trying to find isn't on that hard drive. How can I prevent spotlight from searching this drive?
tony_sid
Posted 2010-11-07T17:40:13.510
Reputation: 11 651
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System Prefs --> Spotlight --> Privacy.
Add the drive(s) you want to exclude.
UPDATE:
For a scripting approach try this: Disabling Spotlight in OS X Leopard for the removable drives
Should work for Snow Leopard too.
ricbax
Posted 2010-11-07T17:40:13.510
Reputation: 4 894
The only drawback is that if you unmount the drive you will have to re-add it again in the future. – ricbax – 2010-11-07T17:47:40.923
No that's not correct. If you add it to the privacy pane, that computer (and others) will ignore it for spotlight in the future. The spotlight pane writes a .<something> file to the root of the drive, which other systems will recognize. At least that's the way it works in OS 10.6 and I believe in 10.5... – Benjamin Schollnick – 2010-11-08T13:50:18.903
@Benjamin Schollnick - You mean the hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder? You are correct but at the time of writing that comment I had not fully researched the behaviour of Spotlight indexing. – ricbax – 2010-11-08T18:19:47.797
I was thinking of the .metadata_never_index file... – Benjamin Schollnick – 2010-11-08T19:41:03.130
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Assuming you don't want Spotlight to index the drive either, create a file,
.metadata_never_index
on the root of the drive. It will no longer get indexed, and, no index, no search. From this tip from Mac OS-X Hints.
JRobert
Posted 2010-11-07T17:40:13.510
Reputation: 6 128
possible duplicate of How disable mac snow leopard creating .Spotlight-V100 and .Trash folders in USB Flash Drivers?
– kenorb – 2015-04-08T11:07:05.587