Hi Gary,
I have added my flash drive to the Spotlight Privacy list but keeps on disappearing from the list. How can I keep it there.
Thank you.
— Ken
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Spotlight Privacy
Comments: 7 Responses to “Spotlight Privacy”
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It should only appear then when your drive is plugged in. Spotlight won't list drives on the Privacy list that are not present on the Mac at the moment.
If it isn't there even when your drive is mounted, then perhaps it is of a format that doesn't support spotlight anyway? So then adding it to the privacy list doesn't do anything since it won't be indexed. Just a guess on that one.
My drive is in a NTFS format, but spotlight does index the files in there. No matter how many times I have tried to add it back in, it always disappear. I am aware I need my flash drive to be plugged in. I am at a lost myself.
How do you know it is indexing the drive? Can you see the spotlight index on it?
I see it indexing/thinking when I search for a file in flash drive. And when I hover my mouse over the files, it points to /Volumes/PATRIOT/...
That doesn't necessarily mean it is indexing the content of the files. I could just mean it found them by name or type. Use Terminal to list all of the files on the drive (ls -a) and see if there is a .Spotlight file. Even if there is, it could be left over from before the first time you turned Spotlight off for that drive.
Why do you need to do this anyway? Usually, it is to prevent Spotlight from indexing a large drive and taking up a lot of resources. But flash drives are small, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Just annoyance. I use my flash drive lots and part of the reason it shows up on spotlight is because I do a small manual backup to that drive.
But Gary, you have pointed me to the right direction. You've mentioned perhaps it is of a format that doesn’t support spotlight. And you are correct!!! I tested with another flash drive, and only Extended Journaled is supported.
I tried using a FAT and adding to the privacy list - no go. NTFS - no go. Extended Journaled - YES!
Thank you.
Gary, I take it back. All 3 format works. Again reading your other threads had point me to the right directions. The spotlight privacy did not work because the App BlueHarvest was preventing the writing of "Spotlight-V100" to the flash drive, which I had check off on the options.