Privacy Policy
Snippets index

  Control Spotlight indexing activities

Turns off indexing of files:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

To turn indexing back on, run:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Complete re-indexing of your hard drive (be aware this could be an over night job): it will delete your Spotlight data base forcing it to start over:

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100/*

Hint:

add others to your (do not scan), privacy settings.

Check / setup Volumes indexing

Check:

$ sudo mdutil -sav
/:
    Indexing enabled.
/System/Volumes/Data:
    Indexing enabled.
    Scan base time: 2022-03-15 15:50:36 +0000 (61501 seconds ago), reasoning: '(null)'
/Volumes/Time Machine Backups:
    Indexing enabled.
    Scan base time: 1970-01-01 00:00:01 +0000 (1647420936 seconds ago), reasoning: '(null)'
/Volumes/VMS3:
    Indexing disabled.

Activate:

$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/VMS3

or:

$ sudo mdutil -a -i on