Spotlight Always Reindexes??

[Marble]

I've seen people having trouble figuring out how to reindex with Spotlight, but I'm kind of having problems with it *always* reindexing my external hard drive whenever I log out, or disconnect and reconnect it. I can understand why this might make sense—Spotlight has no way of knowing what sort of information has changes since the drive was last connected—but it's a pain that it does this and bogs down my system every time I need to move my Powerbook away from my computer desk and back again.

I'd like to have Spotlight index this drive, since I store alot of data there, but since I don't ever use it with any other computer, it'd be nice if there was a way to keep Spotlight from reindexing it totally. Does anyone else experience this problem? I mean, if Spotlight feels like it needs to reindex my external after it's been away from the computer every time, why doesn't it reindex my main hard drive after shutting down the computer...? Who knows, maybe I was just in Firewire Disk Mode putting new files on it? Ahh, it's driving me crazy because it's so hard on the external, which is already showing signs of wear and tear.

 

[James Philp]

Have you let it finish the index before disconnecting?
Maybe you need to leave the two alone in a room together for a few hours!
If you've done this, then i would be very worried! Surely A LOT of people use external HD's at home with their PBs - and not to maintain an index - surely not!
Any similar experiences anyone?

 

[mkrishnan]

This sounds pretty unfortunate! I'm sorry! Out of curiousity, is it an HFS+ formatted drive, or is it formatted in some other way?

 

[Marble]

It's a journaled HFS+ that gets fully indexed every time I plug it in (not interrupted!). What a bummer. Apple doesn't know what's going on, either (or maybe I should say is too swamped at the moment to put any effort into it). I hope that the external lives to see a fix for this.

 

[mkrishnan]

It's a journaled HFS+ that gets fully indexed every time I plug it in (not interrupted!). What a bummer. Apple doesn't know what's going on, either (or maybe I should say is too swamped at the moment to put any effort into it). I hope that the external lives to see a fix for this.

Have you considered disabling it in Spotlight as a temporary, if you're really concerned this is going to damage it?

 

[Marble]

I suppose I had better. Pity about that, given how useful Spotlight has been.

 

[Makosuke]

I'm having a very similar, somewhat related annoyance. In my case, Spotlight seems to want to index everything Thoth (an older Usenet reader) downloads, even if the files are being saved directly to a folder in Spotlight's "privacy" list, and aren't even in a format Spotlight should be recognizing.

This of course, as with the index-on-connect problem, results in Spotlight grinding away at the hard drive for several minutes every time I download something, even when it definitely won't find anything. Doing what seems to be a full text index on a temporary file that will be deleted 10 minutes later can't be good for the drive, slows everything down (uses nearly a whole processor on my dual machine), and probably does bad things to the size of Spotlight's index database, for that matter.

Hopefully Apple will eventually give us finder grained control of how and what Spotlight indexes.

 

[Marble]

Hopefully Apple will eventually give us finder grained control of how and what Spotlight indexes.

Agree completely, but... was that a pun?

 

[Makosuke]

Agree completely, but... was that a pun?

No, Freudian slip perhaps, but unintentional. I laugh at myself now.

Also realized something semi-related that may be useful to somebody: After automated backups (using LaCie's free Silverkeeper, but it would probably be the same with any program that produces a bootable clone), Spotlight would suddenly start re-indexing my backup volume, even though I'd told it not to. A check revealed that it had disappeared from the Privacy list... because, it would seem, the "privacy" setting is stored with the index in the .Spotlight-V100 folder, which was being replaced by the backup software. Exclude this file and that won't happen.