Although I (kinda) like Spotlight for searching my internal drive, I almost never want Spotlight indexing external drives I connect to my computer. Since I often work with bad and dying hard drives, the last thing I want my computer to do upon seeing a new drive is to index the whole thing.
Luckily, there is a simple solution that is quicker, easier, and more reliable than adding the volume to Spotlight’s privacy list.
Download here.
After dragging the CloneEject application into your Applications folder, drag it down into your dock. Next time you mount a volume or hard drive you don’t want Spotlight to index, simply drag the volume’s icon on CloneEject’s dock icon.
This simple app works by creating a file on the specified volume called “.metadata_never_index” which tells Spotlight, “never_index!” Then it ejects the drive so it can be remounted, because Spotlight will only check for “.metadata_never_index” when the drive is first mounted.
Many thanks to Tracy Valleau for this app, it’s invaluable to me!
