You use an OS that heavily depends on this, you need to allow it to index. Yes, it keeps track of where all your documents & data are. After any major OS update it will re-index from scratch; the rest of the time it will just periodically tick away in the background, interfering with nothing and helping a lot of the system. SSDs are more resilient than people give them credit for. Yes, the more you use it the faster it will wear out, but a bit of file indexing is going to perhaps shorten its life by 20 minutes or so, overall;-). Yes definitely.My spotlight indexing only runs rarely. If I have a kernel panic reboot or I force a reboot it runs.
Fans getting louder and louder on my Mac Pro 747 ready for take off. This also will affect how the Mac Mail App does for showing search results. Indexing and indexing and indexing, WTF, is it doing it for fun! Surely it doesn’t take that long to index a drive and keep it updated.
If software update causes a reboot, I don't think it runs. I never notice it because I don't use it that often.
I've found the right combination of shortcuts in my dock so that I probably only use spotlight a couple of times a week now. Spotlight is one of my favorite OS X things. If I want to run any app, all I need to know are a han you can dful of consecutive letters in the name of the app and it comes up almost instantly. Spotlight and quick view are two of my favorite things in OS X. There are only a handful of files quickview doesn't know how to open and I'm never faced with waiting for pages or openoffice.org to load up just to read the contents of an email attachment.
On my windows boxes, I always shut off indexing because it is useless. I would never consider shutting off Spotlight indexing because it saves me time every time I use it.
Is Spotlight being a little wonky on your Mac? Is it constantly indexing your drive, or become corrupted so it can’t search? With just a few quick steps, you can rebuild your Spotlight index and put your search woes to rest. Spotlight is great for finding stuff on your Mac, and, can quickly make short work of any search.
But there are a lot of things that can make it go wonky. In such a case, the first thing you should do is reindex your hard drive, which means deleting the old index so Spotlight can crawl through your hard drive and re-catalog everything on it. RELATED: There are a few reasons you may need to rebuild your Spotlight index.
These include:. Search results simply aren’t working, such as if search results disappear as you type in a name. Search results aren’t appearing even though you know for sure the files exist on your system.
You’re getting duplicate results and you’re certain you only have one instance of a file. You get conflicting data on how much hard drive space is being used and how much is available. When you search for items and you get different results each time, using the same search query. If any or all of these things are happening, then it might be time to dump your old Spotlight index and start fresh. Like we said, this is really easy and shouldn’t take too long though that will depend entirely upon the speed of your system and the number of files. To begin, first open the System Preferences and click on Spotlight, or open it from the Apple menu. In the Spotlight preferences, click on the “Privacy” tab.
You may already have items here, but as you see in the following screenshot, ours is empty. Now, drag your hard drive onto the Privacy window. Alternatively, if you want to simply reindex a folder or another volume, you can drag that over instead. For our purposes, however, we’re going to reindex our entire main system drive. When you attempt to add your system drive (or any other folder or volume), you’ll receive the following prompt. Go ahead and click “OK”. Now that your system drive is added to Spotlight’s Privacy window, it won’t be allowed to show you results from it and should remove them from the index.
The next thing you then need to do is click the “-” at the bottom of the Privacy tab. Doing this will cause Spotlight to reindex your entire drive and you should now hopefully start receiving accurate search results. If this doesn’t work, you can try spurring it to reindex manually. First open a Terminal window from the Applications Utilities folder and type in the following command. Sudo mdutil -E / You will be prompted to enter your system password. Once you do so, hit “Enter” and Spotlight should be reindexed.
Hopefully once done, Spotlight will start to return accurate results and your search woes will be a thing of the past.