MacOS – Spotlight Massive (out of control at 100GB+)

macosspotlight

Macbook Pro, 500GB SSD, Yosemite 10.10.3

Is there a way to determine what folder(s) are giving Spotlight grief? Or some other recommendations to fix spotlight?

Spotlight is killing my drive space at 100GB+. I can reset it, but after a day or so I'm right back to zero space free. The actual size jumps up and down, but trends to expand (+2,-1,+2, etc) until the drive is full.

Spotlight, as per

 du -h -d 1 ./.Spotlight*

Yields:

110G ./.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2

Resetting with

 sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/[DriveName]

Starts over as expected frees up the 110GB, but after number of hours, it's back to a full HD.

Best Answer

It turns out that a driver (DisplayLink in this case) was generating gigs and gigs of rotating logs, and this was being indexed which was generating many more gigs. Finding the offending driver was the hard part.

Remove driver (& ditch the port replicator), re-index, all is well.

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How to find out which file triggered an action from spotlight

Would something like this work for you:

on run argv
    set theFile to (item 1 of argv)
    set theFilePath to quoted form of POSIX path of theFile 
    -- your script using the parameters follows
end run

You could skip the first line and just pull off the path if you don't need to use the file itself later in the script.

Also, you'll really want to get ASObjC Runner to parse files and paths easily for 10.9 and older or BridgePlus for newer os.

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After a bit of investigation, I realise this was mostly a misunderstanding:

reordering the categories doesn't affect what gets chosen as "top hit"
the "web searches" are not "web pages". Web searches are always shown.

So: Spotlight preferences are taken into account, they just don't affect those two things.

Best Answer

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How to find out which file triggered an action from spotlight

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