Filed under: OS, Tips and tricks, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: exclude your Time Machine disk from Spotlight indexing
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:
- Launch System Preferences (or you can open the Spotlight preferences from the Spotlight dropdown menu).
- Click on the 'Privacy' tab.
- click the little plus icon (
) - Choose your Time Machine disk (as you can see mine is cleverly named)
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
moiety5 said 10:10AM on 7-29-2008
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.
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Jon Niola said 10:11AM on 7-29-2008
Come on Scott 15" Macbook Pro? You are a big guy I would have thought for sure a 17" would be your choice :)
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rob said 10:15AM on 7-29-2008
This is a really good tip if you like manually searching hundreds or thousands of folders for the backup of a file.
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brian said 10:21AM on 7-29-2008
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.)
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Tried It said 10:21AM on 7-29-2008
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.
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Perceval McElhearn said 10:42AM on 7-29-2008
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
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mark said 1:02AM on 8-22-2008
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.....
Guillaume Laurent said 11:35AM on 7-29-2008
"... 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.
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Chris said 12:28PM on 7-29-2008
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.
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