Indexing

[davecc]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post on this forum. After making a back up to my external LaCie firewire drive, my G5 2.7 has started Spotlight to index my files which were fine (indexed) before back up to the LaCie. Is this normal?

David

[dnanian]

It's normal, David -- it's indexing the external drive -- the backup. The path to the files changed, so the existing index isn't valid any more...

[davecc]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for replying. The drive I was writing about is my existing internal HD which was already indexed. This is the drive I made the back up from to the LaCie. I am a little puzzled as to why it would take an already indexed HD and re-index it.
Thanks
David

[dnanian]

How do you know it was trying to reindex the internal? It seems more likely that it was trying to index the newly copied data on the external...

[davecc]

Hi Dave,
I made two Smart Update back ups and the indexing did nor reoccur. I must have been mistaken the first time. Old age must be setting in.

David

[dnanian]

No problem, David. I think we all feel that way sometimes.

[Badger0003]

Supposed I have a second drive named "Sandbox" that is to be used solely for backup purpose. Since there is often no need to access Sandbox's contents manually, I am thinking about turning off the indexing feature on the Sandbox drive with the following Terminal command:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Sandbox

Question: Does this make any sense at all? Will the system perform better (since it won't "waste" time indexing the second drive)?

[dnanian]

It's not going to make a huge difference, at least on a Sandbox (if it's a Safety Clone), but otherwise, sure -- if you don't need Spotlight, it doesn't hurt to disable it.

Note that there's a FAQ that provides an even easier way to accomplish this.

[Badger0003]

Thanks for the info.

[dnanian]

My pleasure, Badger.