I'm running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and am trying to disable Spotlight indexing on my Time Machine hard drive, as the mds and mdworker processes are running wildly through all day at 15-60% of CPU...
What bugs me is not that my MacBook is running slowly but that this CPU consumption kills some cycles of my battery through time just for a wasting-never-used search in my Time Machine backup...
I've tried to add the Backups.backupdb folder from the Time Machine HD to the Privacy list, but I get this message:
“Backups.backupdb” is a Time Machine backup folder. You cannot add it to the privacy list.
I then tried to completely stop Spotlight using sudo mdutil -a -i off
; this is the output:
/:
Indexing disabled.
/.MobileBackups:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/Files:
Indexing and searching disabled.
/Volumes/Komodo-Edit-6:
Indexing disabled.
/Volumes/MobileBackups:
Index is read-only.
/Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb:
Index is read-only.
/Volumes/TimeMachine:
Indexing and searching disabled.
/Volumes/TimeMachine/Backups.backupdb:
Indexing enabled.
How can I disable this annoying Spotlight behavior? I don't use it very much and it would be painless to disable it for good, or at least stop indexing my Time Machine backup...