Mac Os X Spotlight Indexing External Drive
- Mac Stop Spotlight Indexing
- Force Indexing Mac
- Mac Os X Spotlight Indexing External Drive Software
- Mac Os X Spotlight Indexing External Drive Mac
Apple’s Spotlight technology is its built-in searching routine for finding almost anything you will use in your account, and to do this it will create and then maintain a metadata index for each locally attached drive on your Mac; however, there may be times when you open the Spotlight menu and always see the progress bar indicating the system is indexing your hard drive. In addition, if you open the Activity Monitor utility, you will likely see the processes “mds” and “mdworker” using up a large percentage of the CPU.
Generally Spotlight may re-index your drive after a major system upgrade, restoration from backup, or after a fault such as a kernel panic or hang where you had to force-reboot the system. These are expected times for a full re-indexing of the drive to take place, and when spurred, indexing may take several hours to complete. However, if you otherwise see constant indexing and notice high activity with the “mds” and “mdworker” processes, then something is wrong and needs to be addressed.
Here's how you can prevent Spotlight from indexing external drives and Time Machine backups. Connect the volume or drive you want excluded to your Mac. Open the System Preferences. Oct 07, 2012 5. Locate your external hard drive and click 'choose' 6. Close system preferences 7. Re-open system preferences 8. Select your external hard drive from the list and click the small '-' button to. Jul 07, 2014 Apple’s Spotlight technology is its built-in searching routine for finding almost anything you will use in your account, and to do this it will create and then maintain a metadata index for each locally attached drive on your Mac; however, there may be times when you open the Spotlight menu and always see the progress bar indicating the system is indexing your hard drive. Tried your solution and it didn't work on Mac OS X 10.10. But Georges solution worked like a charm. – politicus Nov 6 '16 at 10:06 I can't do this because I am not allowed to add a Time Machine–designated backup drive to the privacy list. Jul 26, 2016 How To Fix Spotlight Forever Indexing Issue On Mac OS X. There are 2 issues can be faced by Mac users realted to Spotlight indexing forever: folder indexing file is corrupt or there’s a folder on your Mac which cause the Spotlight do a forever indexing to that file. Jan 07, 2012 How To Turn Off Spotlight Indexing On A Mac. By: MyBlogPays.com. How to re-index and fix Spotlight search issues on Mac OS X - Duration: 2:44. TUTPOSTS 42,292 views.
May 28, 2014 After doing so, Spotlight will start to reindex your hard drive. Reindex Your Mac’s Hard Drive Using Terminal. Alternatively, you can open up Terminal and enter in the following command to force OS X to clear the index and cause the system to rebuild it from scratch.
Drag your hard drives to this list, and then remove them, to have the Spotlight index on each of them be rebuilt.
First, try clearing your Spotlight index manually, to force a rebuild from scratch and ensure no problems exist with it that could be spurring regular attempts to update it. This can be done in two ways:
1. The Spotlight Privacy list
Open the Spotlight system preferences and go to the Privacy tab. Then drag each of your locally-mounted filesystems (internal and external) to this list, followed by immediately removing them from the list. This will delete the index on the drives, and thereby force the system to recreate them when the volumes are removed.
2. The Terminal
As for most system services, Apple includes a few Terminal utilities to manage the Spotlight index, which can be used to clear and rebuild the Spotlight index on your system. To do this, open the Terminal and run the following three commands sequentially:
The first of these will erase the Spotlight index on all volumes, the second will turn Spotlight indexing off, and the third will then turn it back on. This toggling will ensure Spotlight kicks in to create a new index immediately.Keep in mind that once either of these routines is done to clear the index, once the rebuild begins it may take a long time to complete, so do not be alarmed if you see the same behavior kick in for at least a few hours. Give it time to finish, and then see if the problem persists.
Mac Stop Spotlight Indexing
If you again see the issue crop up, then try looking at your hard drive’s formatting. Filesystem errors can easily lead to access and data handling problems that could, among other issues, have Spotlight continually try to index files. Therefore, use Apple’s Disk Utility program to verify and repair your hard drives:
- Open Disk Utility.
- Hold the Command key and click each of your mounted volumes in the sidebar to add them to the current selection.
- Click “Verify Disk” in the First Aid tab.
Doing this will run the verification on all selected drives, and if any issues are found, then attempt to repair them using the Repair Disk button. If the problem is found on your boot drive, then you will need to reboot to the Recovery HD partition (hold Command-R when you hear the boot chimes at startup), to fix the issue at hand.
Click here to return to the '10.4: Force Spotlight to reindex a drive' hint |
You can also use the command line app mdutil to do the same thing. Although either way you'd have to know something about running commands in Terminal.
For example: sudo mdutil -E /
This was in fact the reason why I bought Tiger. Am pretty disappointed not being able to search for content on a server volume. Wouldn't mind to leave one workstation running overnight just for doing the indexing.
Indexing a FW drive is possible though. Great! Concerning speed I believe my gigabit network being somewhat more effective compared against FW 800, let alone FW 400.
Any solution out there?
You can also do this from the command line with the mdutil command. Launch Terminal and enter:
and the index file will be erased and rebuilt. The '/' stands for the boot volume; you can substitute the pathname of any volume here.
Substitute '-s' for '-E' to show if indexing is enabled on the volume, and '-i on' or '-i off' to enable or disable indexing. Note that mdutil must be run as root; hence the sudo.
You can also use mdimport to index a subset of files:
would index your Documents folder and
would index all AppleWorks files on your computer.
will list all installed metadata importers.
For some reason, Spotlight doesn't work on my System Preferences. No matter what I type in, everything dims. Anyone has a solution to this?
Thanks in advance! Canon pixma pro9000 mkii.
Thanks for the info on forcing Spotlight to re-index, but it STILL can't find lots of stuff on my hard drive, both folders and files.
Also useful is the -f flag: I keep all my music on my iPod; Apple (probably in an attempt satisfy the RIAA etc etc etc) hasn't allowed Spotlight to index your iPod's music (although all other files on the iPod are indexed), even when specifying the correct directory. Fortunately the 'force' flag bypasses this inconvenience:
$ sudo mdimport -f /Volumes/your_iPod/iPod_Control/
for indexed music goodness.
I was having a similar problem where much of my content wasn't showing up through Spotlight. So, I entered the 'sudo mdutil -E /' command as suggested. Spotlight immediately when through a reindex process that took approximately an hour to complete. But, once it was done, I discovered that none of my imported mail could be accessed (the messages appear to still be there, but they don't show up under the Mail application).
Any suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!
Try
mdimport ~/Library/Mail/*/*.mbox/Messages
Good luck
When I installed tiger yesterday the first thing I wanted to try was spotlight.
First it took about an hour to dig through all my files (80GB - full :-( ) and even then it didn't seem to find everything.
After playing around for a while I noticed that the results I was getting from spotlight got better and better. After about 2 hours it worked beautifully!
Even so, it looks like you need a plugin if you want to look for system files or things like korn shell scripts. (I'll be looking into that today)
Has anyone been able to figure out how to get Spotlight indexing to remain on after a reboot on Tiger Server? `sudo mdutil -i on /` will turn indexing on for the system, however it does not remain on after a reboot I've found. I simply want to make Server behave like User, anyone have some insight here?
Hi alli now have yosemite 10.10.5 installed and have a usb wifi card made by liteon,i beleive the card uses the ralink rt2500 chipset, the card shows up in system informationas 802.11g wlan and is recognised as ralink manufacturer.i am guessing that this will need kexts to work properly and the connect utility,my question is does anyone have the right kexts / utility for this to work and if not couldsomeone explain if it is possible to modify a kext to get it functioning properly and how?i will attach the system info screen shot here as welltnx. Hey thanks man, that explains a bit more about the system profiler as well, i was always under the impression that if a profiler, windows, mac etc listed the device as what it is, like the usb wifi card, then it recognised it even though it wouldn't work.i guess the only thing its usefull for is basic device info, i wander why they didn't just call it device info then.the link you gave me is not working though its a 404 at mediatek, but i think its prolly gonna be quicker and easier to by a new wifi card and fit it, good bookmark though tnx@C.frio thanks for you help as well. Ralink wifi driver.
spotlight wouldn't find any of my iTunes tracks nomatter what I did. The same for some word documents. However, they both got indexed when I openned them in the finder (not when I played the tunes in iTunes). So I opened iTunes and minimized it (important or you'll have to leave your mac alone a while) and turned off the sound (you may like it but it's a pretty odd effect). Then ran the command below
find ~/Music -name '*.mp3' -or -name '*m4p' -exec open {} ;
This opens in turns each and every track. Voilla, indexed.
May be worth a try if the mdimport command gives no mileage.
I've had this problem and it REALLY bugged me because I wrote a spotlight driven music search for my website. TONS of results weren't showing up. The answer turned out to be simple though, and it was `mdimport ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music`. This does the same thing as your 'open' trick, but without having to open every file.
Check `man mdimport` for more syntax stuff.
Has anyone found a way to force spotlight to show my music files on my ipod(shuffle in this case)? When I first plug it in it shows them fine for a couple of seconds, but then after it's done indexing it's pretty clear that apple explicitly is removing them! I've been waiting for a long time for spotlight as a way to get my files back off my ipod(20gb) so I can get them onto the shuffle easily, but it looks like apple is still block this.
anyone successfully able to show your files on your shuffle through tricking spotlight somehow?
See my post above:
sudo mdimport -f /Volumes/your_iPod/iPod_Control/
I still can't get Spotlight to work with my System Preferences. Like I said earlier, no matter what I type in, everything just dims. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I get lots of warnings: for example
mdimport ~
gives
005-05-01 16:08:22.879 mdimport[721] Importer using too much memory (105 MB), hit threshold. Last file imported was: <file>
and
Incorrect start/end range ordering; fixing.
quite a bit.
Wonder if that's why the initital indexing didn't quite get everything?
You could always call the mdimport command iteratively, like `find ~ -type f -exec mdimport '{}' ;
I'm getting the same bug mentioned by others: no highlighting of of sysprefs from the sys pref search box, even after re-indexing with mdutil -E /
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http://spacebit.dyndns.org
For people uncomfortable with using command line, etc., another way to delete a volume's Spotlight index is to open the Spotlight prefpane, and drag the volume to Spotlight's 'Privacy' window. The index will be deleted immediately. To get Spotlight to re-index the volume, remove it from the Privacy list.
Force Indexing Mac
If you do that with a folder, Spotlight apparently will not reindex the folder's contents. I tried with ~/Library/Mail/ and after removing it from the privacy list I could not get a single result in Mail when searching in 'Entire Message'
Latest from Apple
Spotlight: How to re-index files and folders
Want to re-index a file or folder—or even an entire volume—for Spotlight (part of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger)? Just do this:
From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
Click Spotlight.
Click the Privacy tab.
Drag a file, a folder, or even an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
Remove the item or volume you just added.
Spotlight will re-index the contents of the item you initially dragged to the list
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Mac Os X Spotlight Indexing External Drive Software
Mac Os X Spotlight Indexing External Drive Mac
THIS WORKS GREAT_ I DRAGGED MY HD OVER TO THE SPOTLIGHT PRIVACY SCREEN - CLOSED OUT OF SPOTLIGHT BACK TO THE MAIN SYS PREFS SCREEN - THEN CLOSED SYS PREFS DOWN_
RELAUNCHED SYS PREFS AND WENT BACK INTO SPOTLIGHT_
DELETED OUT THE HD ICON FROM THE PRIVACY SCREEN AND CLOSED OUT THE SYS PREFS_
FOR A MINUTE I DIND'T THINK THIS DID ANYTHING UNTIL I REALIZED MY SYSTEM SLOWED WAY DOWN_ CHANGING APPS - LOADING WEBPAGES SWITTCHING WINDOWS WITHIN THE SAME APP_
I know this thread goes back to april but..
Is it possible to index networked drives. Does the drive need to be mounted (like a mounted NFS share) for spotlight to index it? How depandent on the UFS is spotlight?
This will be possible in Leopard, or maybe Leopard Server.
Who needs command line crap. If you do anything to force Spotlight to re-index the problem is solved. I went to System Prefs>Spotlight and I selected my mail folder to be private. I then restarted my machine. Counterintuitive as it is, my mail messages were searchable. I have since reset the privacy setting back so that no folders are private thinking that it might make future emails private. It is still working to this day.