Comments on: How to completely disable Spotlight

By: drx1

drx1 — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 21:27:29 +0000

Looks like that config file – hostconfig – is going away … in 10.7 – that is on or after about 10.7.4 or later. It is still there, but there are no spotlight options – pity.

I do not like some random (even from Apple) program indexing everything on my computer… you hook a random USB drive and the system can go nuts. This is dumb, dumb, dumb. There should be more kill/disable options in the GUI/System Preferences —- or even via CLI, but it appears this info is out of date.

The OLD FIND FILE was awesome, fast and reliable – and IIRC – did not require any indexing. I know regular uses may like SpotLight, but SL is about 3 steps backwards – or bassawkards or many others.

By: pb

pb — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:42:56 +0000

… you want to completely eradicate spotlight from your machine as it -continuously- screws up your back up system.

Use find(1) if you want to search for something.

Using a mac for 10 years and never had the use for something like spotlight.

By: Phil Hawkins

Phil Hawkins — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:53:40 +0000

AMEN!!

By: 5 widely unknown Mac OS X features. | Montana Flynn

5 widely unknown Mac OS X features. | Montana Flynn — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:48:20 +0000

[...] turned into spotlight. Spotlight is great at finding stuff (if you have a powerful computer if not, turn it off since it is a memory hog. But what if I don’t want to search through every folder or scroll [...]

By: James

James — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:37:58 +0000

THANKS! so nice to get my cpu back. Some simple minded users might not understand why not to use spotlight, here is why:

For two days my machine has been CRAWLING, nearly unusable. Turns out that it was all spotlight trying to index a little over 20TB of email backups on an array I had just connected. For people like myself who work with large RAID arrays containing large amounts of data Spotlight will nearly disable your system.

By: boo

boo — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:28:43 +0000

I hate to disable it completely, but it keeps crashing on usb flash drive usage. I have tried it on over 30 separate macs.
Terrible flaw in the system I think, and yet there is no way to completely disable indexing on flash drives, because every flash drive will read differently when plugged in, so the privacy tab is useless in that regard.
oh well, it’s not disabled, hope this helps.

By: MacNewbie

MacNewbie — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 19:28:33 +0000

I’m getting the same error message. Any further thoughts on what that means and what I need to do? Thanks.

By: Matti G

Matti G — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:16:01 +0000

waah i disabled it in 10.5 by moving the two plist files as above (i just wanted to prevent reindexing during migration assistant) but now that i’ve put them back it’s still not working even though the files are there… any idea what I do now?

I did the same thing with the plist files trying to improve the audio latency with GarageBand. Yes, and I put them back and now I can’t get Spotlight working again either.

Is there a simple fix?

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:36:08 +0000

Im trying to disable it but when I type sudo nano /etc/hostconfig doesnt appear in my list SPOTLIGHT, just the following options

AFPSERVER=-NO-
AUTHSERVER=-NO-
TIMESYNC=-NO-
QTSSERVER=-NO-

(mine one is MACBOOK PRO 10.6.3)
what do i do to find spotlight?
tks
Ricardo

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:27:06 +0000

Help, what’s happening, I meant to say

…If you choose Show All, on seeing the Spotlight results, you get a ‘Smart Folder’

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:38:30 +0000

Sorry, should read …If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’…

By: John Wheater

John Wheater — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:34:38 +0000

The comments from What Haveyou and WTF seem a bit strict.

If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’, and can sort the entries by name, type, and date. The whole setup seems most useful, and it’s hard to fault the design.

As for Darren’s “noisier and cooler”, I should think most of us hardly know we’ve got a drive – my 250Gb just provides an infinite amount of space and stays shtum. And I can find any text, anywhere.

You do need to turn off Spotlight sometimes, though. I was very puzzled, on mounting a 16Gb USB stick and dumping the world onto it, to see it ticking away for ever after I’d finished with it. This was the mighty Spotlight patiently repeating all its useful work on a slow device.

That’s what led me here, and thank you all very much.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:36:15 +0000

I disabled Spotlight and also removed the menu bar icon (Google it if you’re interested). Without all that indexing, I’ve found my drives generally run quieter and cooler.

By: goran

goran — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:15:09 +0000

I had the same error last night. “could not set indexing status for volume.” turned out to be major mess of the directory structure of the hard disk. I’m now restoring from a backup after formatting the hard disk.
I did install the drive patch that came a few days ago. Hmmm, maybe it’s related?

By: machinehead

machinehead — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:08:09 +0000

mdutil -i off /

gives me an error: “could not set indexing status for volume.

also I had to access root prior to this command.

any ideas?