How to avoid spotlight to read/write to an external drive?

[halloleo]

I have an external Time Machine drive "Follow" which I do not want to be used by Spotlight. So I made sure it is in Spotlight's exclusion list:

However I can still (even after hours) here the external disk churning away. Looking at the open files with Sloth (a GUI to `lsof`) I get:

This shows clearly Spotlight si doing something on the disk. How can I stop this?

PS: I'm on Catalina 10.15.7

 

[bogdanw]

The usual way is to remove the drive from Privacy and add it again. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
If that doesn’t work, from Terminal

mdutil -i off -d /Volumes/Follow/
rm -r /Volumes/Follow/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/

 

[halloleo]

Great tip, @bogdanw . Makes total sense.

However, when I try to disable viamdutil -i off -d /Volumes/Follow/ I get

/System/Volumes/Data/Volumes/Follow:
2022-02-04 22:54:01.939 mdutil[4067:480418] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /System/Volumes/Data/Volumes/Follow -> kMDConfigSearchLevelOff
Indexing enabled. (Indexing level may not be changed on volumes which have a Time Machine backup)

Follow does contain a Time Machine backup (from another machine), but how can I switch Spotlight off in this particular case?

 

[bogdanw]

I don’t use Time Machine, so I don’t know how to deal with this case.
As always, maybe try with sudo

sudo mdutil -i off -d /Volumes/Follow/

Another idea, kMDConfigSearchLevelOff value is set in /Volumes/Follow/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist - Stores - PolicyLevel. You could try to add it manually and see if Spotlight obeys it.

 

[halloleo]

Thanks for the tip. Will try it.

(For moment I was able to switch indexing off when the drive is connected to another computer (running Mojave) - Let's see whether this maybe propagates to when the drive is connected to the troubling computer (which runs Catalina).

 

[Fishrrman]

My solution to "spotlight problems" is to TURN OFF spotlight.
I don't want it mucking around with my drives!

 

[halloleo]

My solution to "spotlight problems" is to TURN OFF spotlight.
I don't want it mucking around with my drives!

Thank @Fishrrman . Question is though how can I turn spotlight completely off?

I tried the

sudo mdutil -i off -d /Volumes/Follow/ sudo rm -r /Volumes/Follow/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/

but after a while the drive starts working away again… and the Finder holds “random” files on the drive open. Really strange.

 

[unphased]

Yeah I had to turn off spotlight on my 12 inch macbook since it would keep it hot nonstop.

So now I can't even launch apps. I would really love it if I can tell spotlight to do nothing but index apps. It really does not need to do much of any work to index ~100 folders in the /Applications directory.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Spotlight is used to index the files on your Mac, but it is not used by Time Machine to log file changes1. However, if you add a Time Machine backup disk to the privacy list, you will continue to see messages that Spotlight is indexing your backup disk. This indexing is necessary for Time Machine to function properly and can’t be disabled. Spotlight does exclude from searches any items you store on your backup disk that are not part of a Time Machine backup.

Does Time Machine need the Spotlight index?

On OS X, does Time Machine need the index maintained by Spotlight? Will disabling Spotlight completely (via mdutil) affect Time Machine?

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