Spotlight Privacy List

Question

On my Macbook Pro, I am booting from the internal drive for personal stuff and from an external disk for work. Both run Snow Leopard. When I boot from the external/work drive, I want to exclude my internal drive from Spotlight searches, and when I boot from the internal drive, I want to exclude the external drive. But the list in the Spotlight/Privacy tab is the same regardless of which disk I boot from. Where is that list stored and, more importantly, how can I have two lists, depending on which disk I boot from?

Answer 1

If you're running two different OS X installation from two separate drives, this sound, well… impossible.

Try to boot with the internal drive but keep the second one plugged. Then take a look at man mdutil in the Terminal.app, you can try the -p and/or the -E parameter(s) with the second drive. This could help if you have tried in the past to use both of the drives simultaneously… If this works, do the same by booting from the second drive.

I was also wondering if you're being confused by the same names of the not-indexed folders/volumes; or if you have only a second user on the second drive…

By the way, the exclusions list is /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Exclusions.plist.