Important Spotlight Index Notes

/ 2 February 2007

When my drive was replaced after Apple’s mistake, they inserted one of my backup drives. I had set those drives to have no Spotlight indexing or searching. Of course, once one of those drives is the internal boot drive, you really need that index there and Spotlight searching it. Here’s what I did and the commands and steps I took to get the indexing and searching back and active. First, this command-line command (sudo mdutil -E /) was used to remove the current Spotlight index. This command had to be executed though being logged in as an administrator within the Terminal window. Then you have to go into your admin account to delete the drives entry on the no-index listing. Immediately after that you should see Spotlight indexing your boot drive. Now, in your admin account Spotlight will index the root directories and your admin user directory. However, when you log into any other account Spotlight will start indexing that user’s directory into the same initial index as your admin account started (by the way, the actual index lives at “/.Spotlight-V100”). Even though the indexing within a second and third user account is just adding to that same index, it will take the exact same amount of time as the original indexing took. I’m also pretty positive (however not sure) that the system generically won’t allow you to add you boot HD to the list of “Don’t Search” locations, plus who would ever want to try it, everyone uses Spotlight in their day-to-day Mac OS X use nowadays.Î

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