Exclude Spotlight from indexing External Drives and folders
Getting Spotlight to skip indexing particular folders in a fixed drive is as simple as dragging the folders into Spotlight’s Privacy Settings tab. However, in order to get Spotlight to stop indexing external drives (USB drives, external hard disks, etc), the Privacy Settings tab only disables it temporarily – when you remount the volume, indexing begins again.
To avoid Spotlight from indexing an entire volume, create an empty file named .metadata_never_index in the root folder of the volume. If your volume is called MYDATA, for example, open up Terminal and type:
$ touch /Volumes/MYDATA/.metadata_never_index
Spotlight should now skip indexing this volume – as long as this file exists.
thx
Works like a charm. Now that I don’t have to wait forever for Spotlight to index my 64GB thumb drive.
In fact, you can even ‘touch’ this file (.metadata_never_index) when the device is plugged in to Windows machine.
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