When I mount an external disk, I can add it to the Spotlight privacy pane and all is well; Spotlight will quit indexing the drive. However, if I unmount/mount the drive or reboot/mount the drive, Spotlight starts indexing the drive all over again and I have to add it to the privacy pane again. Is there a way to make Spotlight permanently "forget" an external drive?
View 4 RepliesIn any case I'd like Spotlight to do the following:
1. Index stuff like System Preferences (so that I can find "Sharing" preference pane directly from Spotlight)
2. Not index all the system ".c" and ".h" files
I'm not able to figure out which dirs I should exclude from Spotlight Prefs -> Privacy (nor can I find the default settings for Spotlight)
I have all my OS X applications that come with your mac on a seperate .dmg file, that's just how it happened. I'm not sure how it happened, but when I took my computer home, it just installed like that. I bought the iMac ex-display from PC World last august and it didn't come with any documentation, reboot disks or an apple remote. They say they don't have them with them, but they obviously do.
I keep forgetting to mount the .dmg every time I reboot, because I'm a klutz and becoming old at a young age. I was wondering if there's any way to automatically have the mac mount the disk image?
I know there's an option for this for your internal drive under energy save, and it makes my computer loads faster, but I still use 4 external drives, and when they fall asleep it takes a few seconds before they wake up and it makes my computer feel old again.
Is there away to keep them awake permanently? And if there is, is this a BAD thing? I imagine it's better than the moving parts going over and over when it's waking up multiple times a day.
I usually had spotlight search disabled, cause I don't really use the search at all .. well that was until yesterday I was looking for a file on the backup drive. Needless to say it took quite a while to find it, so I went back to considering spotlight again.
Long story short I switched on indexing for both the local disk (160GB) and the USB Backup Disk (1.5TB) and left spotlight running over night .. it is not quite there yet .. but the index is already almost 40Gb in total .. that is 20GB locally and then another 19GB on the USB disk.
So my question .. is that normal? Does spotlight store the index of the external disk locally again? I can't imagine the index of the ~100GB I have stored locally to be that big ..
Is it something normal while indexing and will reduce itself when it is done?
People usually report their indexes well below 1GB for larger disk than I use here at least that was what I found googling.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my internal HD to my External 3 times a week. I have CCC set to erase the external, and copy everything over each time it backs up. The only problem im having is I can't stop Spotlight from indexing/searching my external drive. Adding the drive to the Privacy tab in the Spotlight Prefs works, but only until the next backup, after the next backup, and a restart Spotlight indexes my External drive again. It's annoying cause when I search for files I get 2 of everything. How the heck do I stop spotlight from searching my external?
View 16 Replies View Relatedright, i have a HFS formatted 500gb external drive which i use everyday, but today spotlight just keeps indexing it, it has a lot of media on it which i access daily so spotlight is needed to search it.
i mean its been indexing for a good 2 hours.
I have an external drive with a lot of music on it. I recently upgraded to Lion and now the spotlight will not search the disc.
There used to me a spotlight box in the corner of the drive window and now there isn't. The disc is half a tare and it's next to impossible to search manually. It is a Go Flex drive.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 20" screen 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
It's actually one of five partions on the external drive, and the only one with a problem. Two of the other four are nicely on the Privacy List, and the other two are both indexed and kept nicely up to date. But the Fifth cannot be indexed, although it once was partially. I have run Spotless, which lists all other drives just as I expect but for this one it reports: "The Metadata Server is reporting that content indexing is DISABLED for the volume Fifth but the volume itself is reporting that the content indexing status is set to ENABLED." It is possible to find an 8Kb index on the volume, then Trash and delete it; Spotlight immediately re-creates another index-in-waiting but does not actually do the indexing or add anything in the folder. An added frustration is that the 'folder' is both invisible, locked and seems to be without 'ownership' or other conventional attributes.
1) I have done the primitive Add to Privacy and Remove Dance nothing has changed.
2) I have used Terminal, deleted all .Spotlight-V100 indexes, disabled Spotlight rebooted, renabled it and rebooted—nothing has changed. This included carefully following steps in other posters' accounts (some failed, some succeeded) and a site that gave a particularly thorough version.
3) I have used Spotless although it offers to do such things as Delete the empty index and re-start Indxing, it then reports it couldn't due to an unexpected error.
4) Some folks have pointed to another faulty invisible file variously naming it '.metadate_never_index' and '.metadataneverindex', to be found in '.hostconfig' or eleswhere at the root and destroyed, but I never didscovered anything like it. I did perhaps succeed in adding the line: SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to that file, based on another bit of advice, but it seems to have had no effect.
The terrible irony is that I use FindAnyFile and good ol' FileBuddy for all my searching. All I want is to 'Show Item Info' in Finder's View Options. Wouldn't you know that needs the Spotlight 'app'.Assuming the Spotless message is accurate, I need to convince the MetadataServer that indexing for that partition is enabled. How do I do that
Info:
McBk w/10.6.8, QkSlvrG4 w/10.3,10.4
New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.
I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I have recently upgraded to Yosemite but when I use Spotlight to search for a file spotlight does not search or include any files on my external hard drive. I have had one community member suggest to explicitly check the Spotlight index via command line. I tried to follow his instructions but my limited skills produced a zero. Unfortunately, he hasn't replied back for further instruction.
Info:
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
One of my important external hard drives recently died and I was wondering of there was a way to see a list of files that were on the drive before it crashed, maybe the spotlight index?
Before sending the drive in for recovery (and not attempting to change the logic board myself) I would like to see if there is any private data on the drive that I wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.
As I have a MBP 17" and a MBA Ultimate 11.6" I have copied all data that I need onto a 1 TB external disk and made 4 partitions on it, one for each type of data ( movies/music, data , software etc etc ). 1. I want to password lock/encrypt it yet be able to access it from both laptops as regular data would be.2. I want to create a backup of the 1 TB disk above, on to another 1 TB external disk and make it encrypted/password protected also. Maybe follow the partition structure maybe not, thats not paramount.What's the best way (apart from .dmg file) to achieve this given the data on disk in point 1 will change often as I create/edit more files.
View 8 Replies View RelatedI want to list the files (Canon images, file names of the form img_xxxx) stored on an external drive (named WINBACK), a partition on a USB HDD. What I did:
1. Clicked on drive WINBACK in Finder.
2. Typed img in spotlight search box - Finder window changed to the full spotlight window. Window shows <Search: 'This Mac' "WINBACK">
3. Changed 'Contents' to 'File Name' so top line of display showed < Search: 'This Mac' "WINBACK" | 'File Name' >.
4. Clicked + to give a search line.
5. On search line changed 'Kind' to 'Name', changed 'matches' to 'begins with' from the drop down lists and then typed 'img_' into the search box.
6. Clicked + to give another search line.
7. Changed 'Kind' to 'File extension', and typed 'jpg' into the search box.
8. This gave a list of files img_xxxx.jpg (obviously 0 < xxxx < 10,000).
As there appeared to be some duplicates I checked the paths of the files. Some were from "WINBACK" but most were from various locations on the internal drive.
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.
Information:
MacBook Pro
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
I've download a Seagate Diagnostics programme to check whether my external Seagate FreeAgent Desk is working properly or not. However, when I run the programme, it indicates that cannot find the disk.
View -1 Replies View RelatedI have a Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Drive which was working perfectly fine until I plugged it into a USB hub. It detected it while in the hub and I was able to get files off of it, but when I ejected it from the hub and put it back into the USB slot on the computer it was not detected by finder. It shows up in the disk utility and I clicked verify and repair and it says:
Verify and Repair volume “Seagate Backup Plus Drive”
Checking file system
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is there any way to get this to work properly again? Or if not is there a way for me to recover my files on the external hard drive?
I have a Macbook PRO late 2011 running OS X Mavericks.
Anyone knows why my external HD (USB disk connected to Airport extreme) does not show up in disk utility? (It sits on my desktop just fine and is fully functional) I' want to erase a partition but now i don't know how.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI have an external 500GB Freecom USB HDD with two Data partitions on it (FAT32 and NTFS). With a Windows tool, I made the two partitions smaller in order to free up some space (ca. 200GB) for an additional Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition. This partition I wanted to create with the Mac OSX 10.6.4 Disk Utility. When I pluged in my USB HDD in my new iMac it mounted the two partitions, NTFS and EXT32 and the Disk Utility tool also showed the free (unpartitioned, almost 200GB) space on the HDD. Then, I chose to create a new Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition and let the tool do it. ...which I probably shouldn't have done. Disk utility stopped and showed an error message saying that it cannot read the partitions anymore and that it needs to be closed. No partitions can be mounted anymore since then on this HDD. Here is the logfile entry of Disk Utility (unfortunately, it's in German):............
View 2 Replies View RelatedI just set up Time Machine, and in order to make my backups efficient, I'm trying to think what kind of stuff to exclude. I want a full, working backup, so that if I needed to I could have a complete, bootable restore in less than an hour. With that in mind, here's what I excluded so far:
1) My 2nd external hard drive. It's filled with videos and wouldn't fit anyway. I figure if that drive goes down I'll recover what I can from it and re-rip the rest.
2) My downloads folder. I just download so much crap here that I usually throw away instantly or else move. Plus the downloads folder usually has 2 copies of everything: compressed and uncompressed. Even worse, if the download is a .tar.gz, it has 3 copies of the file.
3) My VMWare images folder. Time machine will back this sucker up every hour that I'm using one of the virtual machines (due to the fact that the guest OS is storing virtual memory in the image file), which would completely kill my ability to go "back in time" since it would fill up my drive very quickly.
4) Anything that's already version controlled elsewhere. I have all my code in a subversion repository on another server, so I don't see a point in backing that up. The backup would just be cluttered anyway.
Every time my Mac checks for updates, it finds about 1.2gig of new instruments for Garageband and an iWeb update, but I don't use these and don't want to waste bandwidth on them. how to exclude these without always having to de-select them when downloading updates.
View 1 Replies View Relatedreversing the way Time Machine lets you select the items you wanna back up?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI just had a weird new update in itunes and now all my pc games wav files show in music itunes. how to exclude a certain type of files?
View 2 Replies View RelatedHow can I exclude songs from itunes? In other words how can I hide songs or sound (from the operating system ) in itunes?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'm using Outlook on my MBA and was wondering if there is anyway to exclude emails from the file types that Finer uses when looking at all of your files?
At the moment when I am looking for certain files I find myself having to scroll endlessly to get past the individual email messages/files that Finder throws up.
Info:
iMac G5, Intel iMac, Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.7)
I just set up my external HDD today for use with Time Machine, thing is, I only have about 14GB of files on my Mac partition in my Macbook Pro, and about 53GB on a Bootcamp partition.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI just saw this terminal script dock tip from [URL] where your recent Applications or Recent Documents among other "Recent" choices show up as a stack, which I thought was perfect because I could finally show my recent documents, which I couldn't do before due to smart folders not working with stacks. The only problem now is that the most inane file types show up there, such as iChat files and prefPanes, so I was wondering if anybody knew of script that would allow for you to exclude those doc types from showing up in recent documents.
View 1 Replies View RelatedIs there perhaps a setting to tweak that would prevent iTunes from listing videos (like music videos some albums include) alongside the music library? I usually uncheck them so they don't play after an album runs through but my OCD would much prefer they not even be listed in the same list. I don't want to remove them from my entire iTunes library but would prefer them only being visible within the movies tab.
Info:
iTunes, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
How do you make the exclude file option on zip, or unzip, work for dotted files? For example,
zip -r foo ~/foo/ -x *.txt
will zip all files in ~/foo/ that do not have the extension txt. But this doesn't work for "hidden" files, those that start with ".", like ".txt". So,
zip -r foo ~/foo/ -x /.txt
still gets all the .txt files in foo zipped up, not excluded.
unzip foo -x /.txt
has the same problem: it happily includes any .txt files in foo.zip in the unzipping
Info:
Mac OS X (10.6.8)
