Spotlight - Indexing

May 09, 2008 in Spotlight | 1 Comment

Prevent Spotlight Indexing

Sometimes you don't want your Spotlight to index some parts of your Mac, e.g. your backup drive. If that's the case, you can set up your Spotlight to prevent searching in several locations. This setting can be performed under System Preferences ▸ Spotlight ▸ Privacy. Adding that particular folder into the pane provided will result in Spotlight stop indexing that folder.

ReIndex Spotlight

If you want Spotlight to reindex a certain volume, you can use following terminal line :

sudo mdutil -E -p "/Volumes/Mac HD"

Note : The volume name Mac HD is just for example, you should change it accordingly to the drive you want Spotlight to reindex.

Keep Up to Date

We will come up with more and more interesting topics over the time, make sure to keep yourself up to date using RSS Feeds or Email Subscription.

Related Entries

Some articles taken from our resource base, tightly related to current article, to empower you with more knowledge on tweaking the most out of your Mac.

  1. Spotlight Tweaks
  2. Change Shortcut for Spotlight
  3. What Do You Expect from Snow Leopard?
  4. Leopard Spotlight - Calculator Functions
  5. Leopard - Optimizing Spotlight Search
  6. Label on Finder
  7. Quickness or Accuracy - QuickSilver or Spotlight

1 Comments

06:44 AM

Bill

I "back up" files by just putting them on a flash drive and my XP Laptop. Suddenly The XP laptop is showing all the Spotlight index files. I can't find anything with twice as many files now. I delete all the spotlight index folders and files, put the drive in the "privacy" panel in Mac 10.5.4 so it won't index the flash drive -- but it does anyway. Every possible solution I see online looks like complicated programming. Just dragging the flash drive into the privacy panel under preferences/spotlight does NOT prevent indexing the next time I copy file (or folder) form the Mac to the flash drive. No solution in my search online either.

Reply | Back to Top

Post a Comment

Rest assure, your email address will be secured, encrypted and locked down to our treasure box. Upon filling your comment, we only allow <a>, <b> and <br> tags .

You can't be anonymous

C'mon, I'm sure you've got something to say.