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TUAW Tip: exclude your Time Machine disk from Spotlight indexing

by Scott McNulty Jul 29th 2008 at 10:00AM


Just the other day I noticed an odd thing: the Spotlight magnifying glass on my MacBook Pro had that little pulsating dot in it that means it is indexing something. That was odd, since I hadn't added any large files to my Mac, nor had I connected an external harddrive. Or did I?

As you might be able to guess from the picture above, Spotlight was dutifully trying to index my Time Capsule's harddrive every time that drive was mounted by Time Machine (which is once an hour). This process was making my backups take a little longer than I wanted them to, so I simply excluded my Time Capsule from Spotlight's indexing.

Here's how you do it:
  1. Launch System Preferences (or you can open the Spotlight preferences from the Spotlight dropdown menu).
  2. Click on the 'Privacy' tab.
  3. click the little plus icon ()
  4. Choose your Time Machine disk (as you can see mine is cleverly named)
That's it! Now Spotlight will ignore your Time Machine disk, your backups will run a little faster, and there will be a spring in your step.

Update: As some commenters have noted, this tip does mean that you won't be able to use Spotlight to search your Time Machine backups. That's fine for me, since when I'm using Time Machine I'm restoring a file that I noticed is missing, or an entire folder. I don't need to search for something, however, if you find yourself routinely searching your Time Machine backups via Spotlight this tip isn't for you.

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Just the other day I noticed an odd thing: the Spotlight magnifying glass on my MacBook Pro had that little pulsating dot in it that means...
 

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9 Comments

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glaurent

"... when I'm using Time Machine I'm restoring a file that I noticed is missing, or an entire folder. I don't need to search for something"

Famous Last Words.

July 29 2008 at 11:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Perceval McElhearn

From Mac OS X Hints: "I have concluded that it is not possible to convince OS X (Leopard) to not index the volume being used for Time Machine." http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080724164251242

July 29 2008 at 10:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Perceval McElhearn's comment
mark

Yeah, I have to concur with this. Suddenly, this week, Spotlight decided it needed to index (or reindex?) my Time Machine backup. It's been going for *days*.

Found this tip and added the backup folder to the list -- but to no avail. A few minutes later, Spotlight started indexing the backup again. I thought I was crazy, but I guess not.....

August 22 2008 at 12:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

Actually it probably won't make much of a difference.

If you run "mdutil -sa" it will show the status of all your Spotlight indexes. If your TM disk is attached, it will show you multiple indexes - one for the disk and one for the Backups.backupdb folder. Something like this:

$ mdutil -sa
/Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb:
Indexing enabled.
/:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/Time Machine:
Indexing enabled.

You can't (AFAIK) disable the index for the Backups.backupdb directory.

July 29 2008 at 10:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
brian

You don't need to click the plus and browse--you can just drag disks (and folders) into the list. Same for the "Don't back up with Time Machine" window. I have both Spotlight and TM set to ignore ~/Library/Caches among other things. No reason to fill up my backup disk with a copy of every single web page I've ever seen. (Ignore this if you actually LIKE Spotlight's "search web history" option.)

July 29 2008 at 10:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
BryanF

I tried this a while back when I also got annoyed that it was spending time indexing a backup drive. I believe I did it with the .whatever file flag on the drive to disable indexing. Everything seemed fine until a few weeks later when my Time Machine backups stopped working. In looking at the (limited) log information, it seemed to hang on some "waiting for index" step. I finally made the connection between that and Spotlight. My backups would not happen again until I turned the Spotlight index back on.

Maybe that was just a bug that has been subsequently fixed (this was several months ago), but if your backups stop working down the road, this might be the culprit.

July 29 2008 at 10:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
rob

This is a really good tip if you like manually searching hundreds or thousands of folders for the backup of a file.

July 29 2008 at 10:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jon Niola

Come on Scott 15" Macbook Pro? You are a big guy I would have thought for sure a 17" would be your choice :)

July 29 2008 at 10:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
moiety5

That's good advise except that then if you're trying a Spotlight search within the Finder while using Time Machine, like all the Finder demos show, then you won't have such success.

July 29 2008 at 10:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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