Spotlight indexes external drive after every reboot/reconnect

[vitamanic]

I'm on a MBPro 16 with the latest Big Sur build and the drive in question is a 5TB mechanical LaCie.

Every time I reboot or reconnect my external mechanical drive, Spotlight insists on indexing it for 15-20 minutes. The only things that are stored on it are Time Machine backups. That said, I do have a secondary dynamic volume in case I want to store something else on it. Both volumes are APFS and encrypted. I don't have anything weird on my system, just Adobe, Office, Parallels and some emulators.

I've tried wiping the drive and formatting it fresh as well as wiping the MacBook. Nothing seems to fix it.

My question is... is this intended behavior for removable drives? Does the index really need to be verified each time it's connected or when the system reboots?

Any help would be super appreciated!

 

[bernuli]

I notice the same. It does seem like as you said, the index is being verified. Probably looking for changes since spotlight last saw the drive.

In some cases, I disable spotlight indexing on the drive. But usually I just let it run.

 

[chabig]

Any help would be super appreciated!

As Bernuli said, I too would just let it run. Nothing is broken.

 

[chabig]

Does the index really need to be verified each time it's connected or when the system reboots?

How would Spotlight be able to verify that the index is correct without a quick examination of the drive?

 

[Obaxzity]

Good blogspot

 

[appltech]

Hi! I'd go for spotlight index rebuild and force macOS to rewrite the index this way, but since you already wiped the macbook it was already done in the process. Instead of that, did you try to add the external drive to spotlight exclusions list?
Btw, you mentioned that the external is formatted under "APFS encrypted" - did you encrypt it yourself?

 

[Ray2]

Observation under Monterey, M1 MBA: Settings for Spotlight are not always saved. If your Spotlight privacy settings don't reflect what you set, its somehow or another not saving the changes. Mine is a total fresh install, zero got carried over from my prior install. Not sure where excluded disk settings are kept. They do not appear in the Spotlight plist. If anyone knows I'd appreciate letting me know so I can exclude the disks and set the file to read only.

I'm basically checking Privacy every time I plug in an external.