Clearing things up with regards to Spotlight

[kaleberg]

I am trying to figure out what SuperDuper does with regards to Spotlight.

If I use Spotlight to clone my boot disk, does Spotlight index the clone or does SD clone the Spotlight index? (Alternatively, does Spotlight only index the clone if the clone is not marked as private.)

As a user, I want all kinds of inconsistent behavior:

If I clone my boot disk, then boot from it, I want Spotlight to be up and ready as it was when I made the clone.

If I just pop in the clone disk to backup my boot disk, I don't want Spotlight groveling around the clone and wasting system resources that would be better spent on the backup proper.

So, what does SD do? What does Spotlight do? What control do I have?

[dnanian]

SuperDuper! preserves the spotlight information on the backup. However, Spotlight is sensitive to the path to the data. Since when the data is indexed on the backup it's in a different location than it would be when restored, it'll generally need to be reindexed.

You can, of course, tell Spotlight to not index the backup by adding the backup drive to the Spotlight Preference Pane's "Privacy" tab.