Mac – How to make Spotlight stop indexing the Backup drive

backupexternal-diskspotlighttime-machine

I have a 2TB external drive I use for Time Machine. At random intervals, it will decide to spin up and my entire UI freezes until it's finished. This is incredibly annoying.

It appears that this is due to Spotlight indexing. They suggest adding the Backup drive to Spotlight's blacklist, so I did:

fffffffuuuuuuuuu

Am I stuck having to live with constant beach ball attacks?

Update: I've already tried mdutil. It doesn't work.

$ sudo mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/
Password:
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb:
    Indexing enabled.

If it's impossible to disable indexing, I would settle for making the backup drive never spin down.

Best Answer

Apply it to the volume, not a directory:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/TimeMachine/

Substitute TimeMachine with the name of your backup volume, of course. For example...

Johns-iMac:~ john$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Time15/
Password:
/Volumes/Time15:
2015-10-27 12:37:18.436 mdutil[56686:26121199] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /Volumes/Time15 -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
    Indexing and searching disabled.

Which does leave the subdirectory reporting as "enabled", but (until proven wrong I understand) the setting at the volume level will override.

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