Mac – Spotlight indexing of back up drive

spotlighttime-machine

I've seen some posts about whether you can stop spotlight constantly indexing your time machine backup drive. It seems you can't have it attached to your computer and not have it indexed.

I have been getting around the problem by demounting my backup drive and then remounting it when I want to back up.

I wonder if any anyone has a script that would mount, backup and unmount a backup drive every 6 hours or so.

Thanks.

Best Answer

To not have Spotlight index your Time Machine hard drive while it's powered and attached to your Mac, add Time Machine backup drive (by clicking on the + button at the Privacy tab of the Spotlight system preference. enter image description here

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There a command line tool which you could use: mdutil. Open Terminal.app application and try the following:

To check the indexing status (on|off) for a volume:

thomas$ mdutil -s /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing enabled.

...and to turn indexing off:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
Password:
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing disabled.

...or even better disable spotlight activities:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -d /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing and searching disabled.

Calling mdutil without any parameter shows all the allowed parameters

It works with my NAS nfs mount but then it's much smaller than 100TB. It's worth a try nevertheless.

MacOS – Stop Spotlight from indexing a drive that is regularly unplugged and reattached

This ended up being a SuperDuper! problem. It was doing a fresh copy rather than a smart update and when it does that, it sets the drive to be indexed in spotlight rather than retaining your previous setting. Once I set it to smart update the problem was fixed.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Spotlight, infinite indexing, secondary drives, and NAS

MacOS – Stop Spotlight from indexing a drive that is regularly unplugged and reattached

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