spotlight and Safety Clones
 

Not surprisingly, after making a safety clone, Spotlight is busy churning away, presumably indexing my safety clone.

Given than the safety clone has lots of symbolic links to the main partition, is this a waste...am I getting in effect two references to all my user files? Should I turn off spotlight indexing my safety clone?

After adding a second hard drive to the "Privacy" list, Spotlight now claims to have about 25 hours remaining (up from about 2 hours when I added the drive), and Spotlight is using up about 60% of CPU time.

I know this a Spotlight, not an SD! issue, but do folks on this board understand Spotlight enough to know what's happening here?

No, you don't need to do that. Spotlight should be smart enough to figure out you only have one real copy of your user files (and does here)...

It's a bad estimate. Give it time to settle down, and it should take far less time & CPU.