Spotlight - Stop indexing on ALL external drives?

[island]

I know of the ways to stop Spotlight from indexing certain external drives (using touch) but can you set it up to stop indexing ALL drives plugged in?

I do lots of work that involves new external drives all the time and I get plenty of crashes and I would like to stop Spotlight from even looking at those drives to prevent issues.

Any ideas?

 

[richard.mac]

here are some mdutil Unix commands you could try. replace "drivename" with the name of each volume of your external drives.

To only turn off indexing on a volume: 
sudo mdutil -i off /Volume/drivename/ 

To Turn off indexing and remove indices on a volume: 
sudo mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/drivename/ 

To only turn on indexing on a volume: 
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/drivename/ 

To turn on indexing and rebuild indices on a volume: 
sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/drivename/ 

To only force rebuilding of indices on a volume: 
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/drivename

 

[island]

The only problem with this is that it's good for drives that you always plug in. The drives I use are new all the time so this wouldn't work.

Just looking for a setting that will do it for all external drives, new and old.

Thanks!

 

[Poncho]

Spotless any good?

http://www.fixamac.net/software/spot2/

 

[island]

That would be my last hope, they don't answer e-mails about adding this as a feature but at least with the program I can turn off all indexing and back on again as needed, kinda a pain.

 

[island]

Apparently I was wrong about the company. Check out this response...

Randy,

Spotless 2 for Mac OS X 10.5 has the ability to disable indexing on all eligible drives that are connected to your computer. Spotless 2 uses a background process that monitors drive mounting activities and can automatically disable indexing on any drive as it is connected. You can omit any drive you wish from this process by telling Spotless 2 to ignore them - such as your main boot drive. To omit a drive from this automatic process, you simply highlight the drive in Spotless 2 and click the "Background Support Off" button. A Red X icon in the Background column indicates that the background process will ignore that particular drive. Having the background process running means that the main Spotless 2 application does not have to be running in order to manage indexing. The process will run even after a restart.

Spotless 1 for Mac OS X 10.4 does not use a background process and must be running in order to automatically disable indexing on newly mounted drives.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

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Best regards,

John