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Groups > comp.sys.mac.system > #117289

Spotlight on external drives

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A while agio, I had found a way to tell Spotlight to NOT index external
drives. Tired of cleaning up USB drives I was inserting. (and the System
Preferences->Spotlight->Privacy doesn't know about disks you haven't
inserted yet).


The command is:

> sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SpotlightServer.plist ExternalVolumesIgnore -bool True



I forgot about this, and over time, started to notice that Spotlight on
non external disks wasn't finding my documents as I expected. And it
kept getting worse, to a point where I did some test on a document name
I knew existed and it woudln't find it (let alone its contents).


Tonight I started to investigate:

mdutil -s -a would show my system drive (SSD) indexed.
It woudl show currently networked drive as searcheable.
But except for the Time Machine volume, the other drives I have were not
indexed nor searcheabnle.

> bike:DMA5 $  mdutil -i on /Volumes/DMA5
> /Volumes/DMA5:
>         Indexing and searching disabled.
> 
> bike:DMA5 $  mdutil -i off /Volumes/DMA5
> /Volumes/DMA5:
> 2018-06-18 04:10:55.324 mdutil[63366:12415782] mdutil disabling Spotlight: /Volumes/DMA5 -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
>         Indexing and searching disabled.


I deleted all the .Spotlight-V100 files , unloaded, reloaded the
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Nothing fixed it.

So, I remembered that quite some time ago, I had done that thing for
external drives.

I undid it (-bool False) and low and behold:

bike:DMA5 $  mdutil -i on /Volumes/DMA5
/Volumes/DMA5:
        Indexing enabled.



So, the morale of the story:  OS-X (High Sierra) considers SATA drives
in an enclosure connected via thunderbolt to be just as external as a
USB key you plug into keyboard.

I hear the mdworker re-indexing my disk now !


(and it will take a while since I basically purged all files related to
Spotlight-V100é


Also note: many web sites point to

/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100/volumes  where there can be glitches (and
you fix by deleteing those files and let Spotlight recreate).

This directory does not exist on High Sierra.


BTW, as a side question:  man launchctl now says that all those commands
I knwo are "legacy".

LEGACY SUBCOMMANDS
     Subcommands from the previous implementation of launchd are
generally available,
     though some may be unimplemented. Unimplemented subcommands are
documented as such.

This includes load, unload, submit, start, stop etc.

Is there some technical note somewhere that explains what happened to
launchd/launchctl and how we should be using it from now on, now that
the common commands are "legacy" ?

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Thread

Spotlight on external drives JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> - 2018-06-18 04:36 -0400
  Re: Spotlight on external drives Alan Baker <nunya@ness.biz> - 2018-06-18 06:40 -0700
    Re: Spotlight on external drives JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> - 2018-06-18 14:25 -0400
      Re: Spotlight on external drives Alan Baker <nunya@ness.biz> - 2018-06-19 10:01 -0400
        Re: Spotlight on external drives nmassello@yahoo.com (Neill Massello) - 2018-06-19 09:27 -0600
          Re: Spotlight on external drives Steve Carroll <frelwizzen@gmail.com> - 2018-06-19 08:48 -0700
          Re: Spotlight on external drives Steve Carroll <frelwizzen@gmail.com> - 2018-06-19 19:11 -0700
        Re: Spotlight on external drives Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2018-06-19 15:29 +0000
  Re: Spotlight on external drives Steve Carroll <frelwizzen@gmail.com> - 2018-06-18 19:13 -0700

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