Spotlight, Find/Search function and external hard drives...can I still shine a light?

[JPP]

Sorry - me again.

I have done a search and can't find the asnwer so am posting a thread. I asked yesterday about my concern at not having enough disk space on my 120GB MBP. And got some great replies that have put my mind at ease.

But I was wondering if I do get an external hard drive to back up all my photos and music and media does the spotlight and search/find function still work on an external drive? Spotlight is such a brilliant tool and I know it catalogues your hard drive every time a change is made - does it do this on an external drive?

Also, I've heard that time machine on Leopard will mean that even if your hard drive fails you can still renew your data on to a new drive - does this mean that a back up hard drive will be a thing of the past with Leopard?

Anyone know about these issues?

 

[liketom]

Spotlight will work with external drives - so all is good there -

you can never backup too much IMO so get another external HDD just for your backups and start burning some backup DVD's also

 

[BobP63]

Spotlight will work on an external drive only if you format the drive as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" do that and your good to go.

 

[JPP]

Hi Bob

Do you know how I format it like that? Or is it easy and an option will come up automatically?

Thanks

J

 

[irbdavid]

Its an option during the format of the drive, assuming you use the disk utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) to do this.

However, it seems to generally be a good idea to disable spotlight on drives that are purely a backup of your main disk, as it creates its own spotlight index file in the volumes root as I understand it, e.g. I have my external hdd partitioned to provide a backup volume and a media storage volume. Spotlight is disabled, via right-clicking & get info on the mounted volume iirc, on the backup one, and enabled on the media one.