Creation of the hidden folder.Spotlight-V100 on flash-drive

[Aninatalie]

Good afternoon!

Prompt, please, as it is possible to forbid Mac OS X (Leopard) hidden folder creation .Spotlight-V100 on flash-drive at its connection?

Help me, please.

I am sorry for the English.

[Hal Itosis]

There might be some way to stop the creation of that folder (never tried myself).
What folks typically want is to prevent a searchable index from being maintained
on various drives. That can be achieved by making a special file at the root level:

touch /Volumes/name\ of\ disk/.metadata_never_index

So if your drive were named "My 8 Gig Flash", then you would mount it and run:

touch /Volumes/My\ 8\ Gig\ Flash/.metadata_never_index

--

Then, to erase any current index which it might have already acquired:

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/My\ 8\ Gig\ Flash

[tw]

it's also possible to prevent indexing of the drive by opening System Preferences, going to the Spotlight pane, choosing the privacy tab, and adding the flashdrive to the privacy area. that should delete the current spotlight index on the drive at the same time.

[Cheech'i]

If you have several drives, or if it's someone else's drive and you're trying to prevent it on multiple 'random' drives, you should look into Blueharvest which works well for me.

[Hal Itosis]

tw and Cheech'i,

But if/when Aninatalie takes that flash drive and plugs it into a friend's Mac (or one at work, etc.), then *that* Mac will try to index. The presence of the ".metadata_never_index" file will preclude Spotlight indexing on that volume, no matter which Mac mounts it.

[fwiw]

[macosnoob]

Quote: Originally Posted by tw choosing the privacy tab, and adding the flashdrive to the privacy area. that should delete the current spotlight index on the drive at the same time.

That's what I thought, too. But the old index remains on the flash drive in my experience. It simply doesn't get updated again.

You can minimize the contents of the index by

(1) reformatting the flash drive,
(2) immediately adding it to the Privacy list before any files are placed on the flash drive.

.Spotlight-V100 still will be created, but it will remain empty.

I'd note that if you reformat the flash drive again, even with the same name, it falls from the Privacy list and needs to be added once more. Along these lines, Hal, a question for you: Do you know if there's a way to use your method with some sort of unique system-generated ID rather than the name of the flash drive? I might have several flash drives called "My 8 Gig Flash". Or would it even matter? Would that unique system-generated ID change every time you reformat?

---

Hal's last message posted while I was composing. I see his point.

[Hal Itosis]

Quote: Originally Posted by macosnoob Do you know if there's a way to use your method with some sort of unique system-generated ID rather than the name of the flash drive? I might have several flash drives called "My 8 Gig Flash". Or would it even matter?

Would not matter. The name of the file is simply ".metadata_never_index" and it is totally empty (no data inside).

No matter which method is used, if the disk gets erased or reformatted... then the files telling Spotlight to back off also get erased.

[Malenfant]

Life would be sooo much easier if Microsoft's simply wouldn't show files starting with a "." like any decent OS (Though i have a Philips Standalone DVD Player with an USB port that commits same sin...)

Also described methods works only for the indexing related files, OS X would still litter the thumbdrives with the .Trashes folder and .DS_Store and ._.Trashes files...

Thanks, Cheech'i! Looks like Blueharvest might be useful to me! Much obliged!

[Aninatalie]

Hal Itosis - Many thanks!!! It seems has helped.

tw, Cheech'i - too thanks!