How To Prevent Spotlight From Indexing External Drives on MacOS
erics, Posted February 26th, 2021 at 11:46:15am
On MacOSX 10.10.5 Yosemite, I was having trouble with Spotlight preventing the clean eject of an attached hard drive.
Using the fuser command allowed me to see that it what the Spotlight-specific mds process preventing the eject.
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fuser -u /Volumes/Archive03 |
At first, I tried to disable the indexing via the mdutil command, but that just gave me an error:
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shell> sudo mdutil -Ei off /Volumes/Archive03 /Volumes/Archive03: Error: unable to perform operation. (-400) Error: unknown indexing state. |
I ended up having to force eject the drive:
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shell> diskutil unmountDisk force /Volumes/Archive03 |
The actual solution was so very simple, just create an empty file at the root of each external drive you with to prevent being indexed:
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touch /Volumes/Archive03/.metadata_never_index |
Categories: How-To's, Technology 10.10.5, apple, Disable, diskutil, eject, Halt, howto, Index, Indexing, Mac, MacOS, macosx, mdutil, metadata_never_index, Prevent, Spotlight, Stop, tips, Touch, umountDisk, Yosemite
One Reader Comment
great quick answer, thank you