Getting spotlight to NOT search my external drive

[adk]

I have an external hard drive partitioned into a backup clone and Mass data storage. Whenever I search for things and the drive is on, two copies of each item come up due to the backup, and if i'm not paying attention I open some apps from the backup drive which is sloowwwww. Is there a way to tell backup not to search my backup partition?

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

I'm not 100% positive because I don't have a drive to test it on at the moment, but, couldn't it be somewhere around Apple>System Preferences>Spotlight?

Is there an option for something there?

 

[kiwi-in-uk]

I'm not 100% positive because I don't have a drive to test it on at the moment, but, couldn't it be somewhere around Apple>System Preferences>Spotlight?

Is there an option for something there?

Yes - under "Privacy" you can prevent Spotlight from searching specific folders or disks

 

[stevietheb]

There was some concern a while back, if I remember correctly, about how Spotlight would forget these settings after a drive was ejected. Therefore, the next time it was mounted, Spotlight would index it. I don't know if this has been fixed. If it hasn't, then search versiontracker.com for an app called Spotless.