Disable spotlight for any external drive?

[wb0gaz]

I use USB drives to move large (multi-gigabyte) raw data files to/from mavericks system. I wish to prevent spotlight from ever trying to index any external drive (that is, as a permanent policy for my system), as the indexing is not useful.

I looked at spotlight in system configuration but could not see how to specify "any external drive".

How can I proceed?

 

[LCD]

I use USB drives to move large (multi-gigabyte) raw data files to/from mavericks system. I wish to prevent spotlight from ever trying to index any external drive (that is, as a permanent policy for my system), as the indexing is not useful.

I looked at spotlight in system configuration but could not see how to specify "any external drive".

How can I proceed?

In the Privacy Pane of Spotlight in System Preference click the Add button or drag the disk into the empty box to prevent Spotlight from searching it

 

[wb0gaz]

Thank you for the fast reply ---

I understand I can drag a given external drive into spotlight privacy dialog pane, however, I wish to set up a rule pre-emptively for *any* external drive, so I don't need to do this step each time (as there are many drives involved.)

Thank you again!

 

[w0lf]

As far as I know there is no easy way to do this.

Only thing I can think of is

1) monitor /Volumes using folder actions
2) when something connects add /Volumes/(name)/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist [only if it doesn't exist]
3) then using either a template VolumeConfiguration.plist or the command defaults write edit the file you just made to include this

<key>Exclusions</key>
<array>
	<string>/</string>
</array>

I think the command for defaults write is something like

defaults write /Volumes/(folder_name_here)/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist Exclusions -array-add '{"/"}'

All in all it's probably more hassle than it's worth unless we're talking hundreds of usb devices or you just want to learn some basic bash/applescript.

 

[LCD]

w0lf's solution was discussed here. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486948

 

[w0lf]

w0lf's solution was discussed here. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486948

Hmm yeah .metadata_never_index sound easier assuming you just drop it in the root of the mounted drive.

Not really too sure about the workings of folder actions but if you can run a bash script and pass the items as arguments you could just have something like:

for f in $@; do
  if [[ ! -e "$f"/.metadata_never_index ]]; then
    touch "$f"/.metadata_never_index
  fi
done

You might also have to add in a check to make sure it's not your internal drive.

 

[OS/4]

Just want to add that I found this post very helpful, especially https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5486948 - thanks!

I had an issue with one of my USB sticks being abysmally slow to copy files to - write speeds of less than 0.5MB/s - and just couldn't figure it out, because the same USB stick worked fine on Ubuntu or Windows.

It seems such a "gotcha" for Mac newbies - it took me quite a while to realise what was happening: Every time I was plugging in the stick, Spotlight tried to index it, and because I was too impatient, it never finished, which also explained why sometimes it just wouldn't want to eject and I ended up forcing it. ...really frustrating until I added the USB stick to the Spotlight > Privacy list of things to exclude from indexing - then it started to behave fine and the USB write data rate improved hugely and were/are comparable to using the USB stick on other platforms.

Like the OP, I think it would be nice if there was a setting to just _never_ index any USB sticks, but I'll settle for adding
.metadata_never_index to the root dir of each USB stick I use, which still seems more convenient than having to add it to the Spotlight preferences, or at least going there to check whether I've already added it or not.

 

[OS/4]

.

 

[foice]

defaults write /Volumes/(folder_name_here)/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist Exclusions -array-add '{"/"}'

I am wondering if anything like this might work to exclude from spotlight indexing all files with a given extension, say *.dat. Would you think the VolumeConfiguration.plist can work for this type of exclusion?

Or do you know of another better way to instruct spotlight to ignore certain file types?