Spotlight a Stoplight for Video Pros

WHY can't a bootable backup be set up to be ignored by Spotlight? My backup is on an external drive, not in the root folder, but in "backup" . I can't get the Spotlight Privacy pane to add it.

As far as I know, OS X can only *read* from NTFS, not *write*. And since Spotlight's index of the drive has to be written to the drive... I'm guessing it'll keep the index in memory since it can't be written to the disk in question. Apple really should think about keeping a back-up index for drives that can't be written. And you should reformat that drive... :-P

Could the external hard drive / privacy thing be a filesystem issue? My external FireWire drive always gets included in the indexing, but I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact it's in NTFS format (I know, I know, don't say it.) Just curious...

Weaselboy, that is correct. But there is a good temporary fix if you are not making a bootable mirror of a drive/partition. Instead of mirroring the whole contents to the drive itself, have it backup to a folder within the backup drive. For example: 1) 'Hard Drive' is the main drive I want to backup. 2) 'Backup' is the backup drive. 3) Create a folder on 'Backup' called 'Hard Drive Backup'. 4) The contents of 'Hard Drive' will be placed in 'Hard Drive Backup'. 5) Since nothing on the actual 'root' area of 'Backup' is touched, 'Spotlight' settings hidden in the root of the drive will stay in place. Of course if you're doing a bootable backup, this won't work. But for everything else this should work fine.

Stinksoup, DRM RULES!

Err, dude... You're contradicting your own posts: http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/11/tiger-bits-possible-spotlight-bug/ Cheers!

The drives willl stay in the privacy pane unless you run a new backup to the external drive that overwrites the external drive. For example, I use psnyc to backup to an external drive. The external drive stays in Spotlight privacy pane until I run new backup and unmount. Then the next time I mount Spotlight starts indexing the external drive all over again. Others in the Apple discussion forums have the same problem and have not found a fix. Please fix this Apple.

I'm a bit baffled by the claim since I have two daisy-chianed firewire drives on my desk and all I have ever had to do is simply add them to the "Privacy Pane" and that's it. No matter how many times I mount, unmount or remount the drives "Spotlight" ignores them; no need to readd them every time as the original post claims. I have no idea what the fuss is. But I would recommend that Apple include an option that at least allows you to always have Spotlight ignore FireWire or USB1.1/2.0 volumes. Now that would be quite useful.

I think the quote you just included proved that you can't simply add the drive to the Privacy pane; it goes away when the drive is unmounted. I just realized this truth regarding my iPod, which I had added to Privacy.