spotlight
I would like to have Mac Spotlight avoid indexing volumes with the name prefix of "backup". As in "backupA", "backupB". and "backupXYZ123". Is there any way to use wildcard in Spotlight Privacy? As in, don't index "backup*"?
Now, as far as I can tell, Spotlight Privacy doesn't let to text-edit the names of things it isn't supposed to index. So it isn't even obvious how to specify "backup*".
I know you can use metacharacters in Spotlight searches, but I'd like to use them in Spotlight Privacy.
I had the exact same problem, with all solutions above failing identically. Then I reexamined the directory listing for / and found a hidden file .metadata_never_index in the root directory. I removed this file and was able to turn spotlight on again with
mdutil -i on /.
mds is now reindexing the hard disk, all looks good for now.
Alfred uses the Spotlight index by default, and LaunchBar also has an option to use it. The Spotlight index includes almost all files, so you don't have to adjust what files to index manually.
By default, Alfred is conservative in what types of files it searches for, to avoid muddying your search results. You can tick the boxes for what parts you want to be included in the results by default. If you want to search among all files on the system, you just need to press the spacebar before you begin typing the search term, and it will then search the full Spotlight index rather than just a subsection of it. You also have the open/find keywords, which likewise search the full Spotlight index.
If you always want it to search the full index, then you can enable that option in the preferences. Despite the warning, Alfred is pretty usable (and very fast) even if you enable searching for all files.
(It still excludes the system files that are hidden from normal Spotlight results. But you can search for those by creating a search filter.)
Best Answer
You probably need some sort of script that monitors, when you create new "backupxy" to run the
mdutiland tell spotlight not to index it.