How to disable SpotLight auto-indexing of removable drives?
OK. Spotlight is definitely one of the coolest features in Leopard, if not the coolest of them all. However I am always amused by the lack of configuration options from Apple products. I have my takes on the iTunes, but that’s the topic of another post. For now, my MacBook is burning indexing my Flash drive, which I am just plugging to backup some data and leave. File transfers gave me estimated 2 hours for 10 MB of data or less. Ofcourse it’s finishing faster, but the estimate seems to be affected by the indexing time. I searched the System Preferences, and Googled for a solution on how to disable indexing removable drives. Let alone configuration per device, I want a general option for now. All I could find was this Spotless thing. Which is, as expected, a 3rd party shareware costing $17 just to overcome the limitations of Spotlight. Flash memories are meant for fast transfers. I put a file there, hand it over to my friend to copy it. I don’t want my friend to index it, and neither does he.
Does anyone have a clue on how to fix it? Or why the hell would Apple not allow us to cancel it? Not even configuration, just let me right click the indexing bar and cancel!
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3baid: Hmm… Thanks a lot. I was waiting for you to answer actually when I posted it ;).
Why would people make softwares then if it’s doable?
Still, it’s not so obvious I have to tell you. But if it works, Thanks a million then :)
I know how annoying these things can be coming from a Windows side, but once you set devices primarily for Macs, your files are consistently indexed so every time you plug or unplug, it doesn’t take that long to update indexes.
3baid: I understand the concept of having every thing indexed, but I think an option to right click (or double finger click) the Indexing Flash Memory bar and canceling it makes much sense. That’s my take on it
Oddly enough, in Tiger, I believe it you were able to click an “x” to disable the indexing, but it’s not in Leopard anymore.
3baid: Yeah, that would make more sense to have. Perhaps some programmer commented it while he was testing and forgot to uncomment ;)
@3baid: that is true however if you use a flash disc to move files from one location to another and you add and remove files often then eventually you end up with a large chunk of space being eaten up by the cache files alone. Sure it’s not a huge problem since you can always delete the files but it’s kinda annoying. Oh and I have yet to see the indexing slowing down a USB drive. When you do something that needs the drive like say copying a file the indexing actually stops and resumes later.
actually the issue that I am having with trash buildup has nothing to do with spotlight. Sorry for the spam …
Two ways of fixing this:
- Drag the flash drive into the “privacy” tab in the Spotlight System Preferences.
Or
- Put an empty file named .metadata_never_index in the root directory of the device