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I am getting tired of Spotlight's insistence on indexing my computer after each restart.
Uuurgh!!

Things I've done many times, to no avail:
- Let it finish indexing, according to my set preferences
- Deleted Spotlight's plist
- Repaired Permissions/Repaired disk
- Run Onyx to clear all caches and rebuilt Spotlight's index
- Run Onyx to repair all plists
- Set and reset my preferences
- Restarted like a million times...

... But every time the computer restarts I see Spotlight indexing like crazy, as if it were the first time it does it.

Does anyone have a solution? I just want it to index what I want once and then leave me alone.

Ideally, I'd like to stay with Spotlight and not kill it and try a substitute (unless there's no other viable solution to stop this).

Thanks!

Seems obvious, but have you listed your drives in the privacy tab? That always works for me. I don't list them all as I want to have Spotlight on for some stuff, but other drives (especially removable drives, externals that aren't on all the time, flash drives, etc) need to be listed in privacy to be excluded. You can just go to the root of the drive(s) and exclude them all.

You can also add exclude specific folders on the drive you otherwise want indexed. I exclude everything except folders I know I'll want to search with spotlight.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Seems obvious, but have you listed your drives in the privacy tab? That always works for me. I don't list them all as I want to have Spotlight on for some stuff, but other drives (especially removable drives, externals that aren't on all the time, flash drives, etc) need to be listed in privacy to be excluded. You can just go to the root of the drive(s) and exclude them all.

Yes.
All my HDs are listed in there except for the system drive (which is the only one I want indexed).

bayswater wrote:You can also add exclude specific folders on the drive you otherwise want indexed. I exclude everything except folders I know I'll want to search with spotlight.

That sounds nice.

Ok. I just tried your suggestion, hoping it would rebuild the index or something, but it still tries to reindex everything upon restart.

So the way I have it set right now in Spotlight's preferences is with 4 drives in there (from the root disks, no folders). My system drive, which is the only one allowed, appears to be the one being indexed over and over.

It's almost as if the computer indexes everything and then forgets it did and tries doing it again. And again...
This is over my head. I have no idea what else I can do to fix it...

There's quite a bit out there on the problem. Not many solutions. This second last post in this thread (by ErvDoggie) claims to have a solution:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/32 ... 0&tstart=0

Thanks, Bayswater.

That certainly gives me hope. I will try it as soon as I get a chance and report back.

A lot of people seem to be experiencing this!

Moved to "General Macintosh"

- Run Onyx to clear all caches and rebuilt Spotlight's index

You are causing your problem. Stop running Onyx. It does nothing but waste time on late model Macs. The same goes for Disk Warrior but at least DW doesn't do anything else.

Let Spotlight do its thing and leave it alone. Likewise, the OS uses caches to speed up many tasks.