Spotlight Index keeps becoming corrupt?

[Jack426]

Hey all,

Any ideas on why this might be happening? This is my fairly new Macbook, that I've had for about 2 months. I'm using about 50gb of 499gb, and yet the storage section in "About this Mac" was showing I had over 100gb worth of apps. If I go to Disk Utility, it clearly shows 450gb free of 499gb, with 50gb being used. Adding and removing the hard drive to Spotlights "do not search" section quickly resolves the issue. It's happened twice now, and I have yet to figure out why.

Thanks for any and all help,
-J

 

[chabig]

Everything is normal. As you said, you're using about 50GB and have 450GB free on a 500GB drive. It all adds up...except when you look in About This Mac. The extra 50GB that's displayed there are local Time Machine snapshots. That's Time Machine working normally. Time Machine only makes local snapshots when there is plenty of free space on your drivehe space is always available to you if you need it. Read about local snapshots here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

In particular, read the section about how local snapshots use storage on your drive:

"Because Time Machine removes local snapshots as needed, Finder and Get Info windows don't include them in their calculations. To see how much storage space local snapshots are using, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, then click Storage. The space used by local snapshots is labeled Backups."

 

[Jack426]

Everything is normal. As you said, you're using about 50GB and have 450GB free on a 500GB drive. It all adds up...except when you look in About This Mac. The extra 50GB that's displayed there are local Time Machine snapshots. That's Time Machine working normally. Time Machine only makes local snapshots when there is plenty of free space on your drivehe space is always available to you if you need it. Read about local snapshots here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

In particular, read the section about how local snapshots use storage on your drive:

"Because Time Machine removes local snapshots as needed, Finder and Get Info windows don't include them in their calculations. To see how much storage space local snapshots are using, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, then click Storage. The space used by local snapshots is labeled Backups."

Thanks for the quick response. Forgive me, I should have mentioned in my first post, I don't have Time Machine enabled. The only things I store on the Mac (besides my applications) are the documents I'm currently working on. I store (and manually backup) all of my data on external SSD's, so I can use them anywhere on any computer.

I use TM on my iMac, and it displays my backups in About This Mac. However, the MacBook clearly showed that "Applications" were taking up over 100gb, when in reality they weren't. I'll have to check next time it happens, but I'm pretty sure that Photos, Music, Documents, etc. all showed the correct usage. So it totally baffles me.

 

[chabig]

Thanks for the quick response. Forgive me, I should have mentioned in my first post, I don't have Time Machine enabled. The only things I store on the Mac (besides my applications) are the documents I'm currently working on. I store (and manually backup) all of my data on external SSD's, so I can use them anywhere on any computer.

I use TM on my iMac, and it displays my backups in About This Mac. However, the MacBook clearly showed that "Applications" were taking up over 100gb, when in reality they weren't. I'll have to check next time it happens, but I'm pretty sure that Photos, Music, Documents, etc. all showed the correct usage. So it totally baffles me.

You said, "Adding and removing the hard drive to Spotlights "do not search" section quickly resolves the issue" and I read that as Time Machine, not Spotlight. Time Machine makes sense to me. Spotlight does not.

 

[Weaselboy]

Hey all,

Any ideas on why this might be happening? This is my fairly new Macbook, that I've had for about 2 months. I'm using about 50gb of 499gb, and yet the storage section in "About this Mac" was showing I had over 100gb worth of apps. If I go to Disk Utility, it clearly shows 450gb free of 499gb, with 50gb being used. Adding and removing the hard drive to Spotlights "do not search" section quickly resolves the issue. It's happened twice now, and I have yet to figure out why.

Thanks for any and all help,
-J

Don't worry about it. Lot's of people are seeing this and it seems to be a bug with Yosemite. Like you said, reindexing Spotlight fixes it for a while, then it comes back. Mine is all out of whack right now and I have not bothered to reindex to fix it.

 

[Jack426]

Don't worry about it. Lot's of people are seeing this and it seems to be a bug with Yosemite. Like you said, reindexing Spotlight fixes it for a while, then it comes back. Mine is all out of whack right now and I have not bothered to reindex to fix it.

Ok, thanks. Hopefully El Capitan will fix the issue.