Spotlight not Indexing External Drive with Time Machine Backup

[Mark200789]

I'm on Catalina and this problem has persisted even after a clean reinstall of the OS (not for this problem in particular). I have an 8TB external drive that I use for time machine as well as various data storage - downloads, caching, renders, etc. I'd like to be able to search this drive, but I can't. Doing a search in finder returns nothing. I wanted to do the reindexing trick, but you can't remove a drive from spotlight if it is a time machine drive. Is it not possible to index any other data on a time machine drive other than the backup?
Edit: I just removed the drive from time machine and remounted it. It's still called a time machine drive and can't be reindexed. Now that I selected it as a time machine drive again time machine is starting from scratch and not using the old backup. Sigh.

 

[tyc0746]

You may have to partition your Time Machine drive into 2, so that you can reserve some space for your projects (that can be indexed), and leave the rest for Time Machine.

BTW, you're not using Time Machine to backup your projects on the same disk as the backup are you?

 

[Mark200789]

You may have to partition your Time Machine drive into 2, so that you can reserve some space for your projects (that can be indexed), and leave the rest for Time Machine.

BTW, you're not using Time Machine to backup your projects on the same disk as the backup are you?

I think that's what I'll do. No, I'm not keeping my backups on the same drive as my backed up data. Don't worry. It's just downloads and renders, but not source files.

 

[tyc0746]

I think that's what I'll do. No, I'm not keeping my backups on the same drive as my backed up data. Don't worry. It's just downloads and renders, but not source files.

That's a mistake I'm not going to make again (not keeping on top of regular & secure backups).

Took me about about 6 months to get my client archives back to the best position I could - and I was just lucky I'd stashed so much stuff on mine/client FTP sites and CD/DVDs (that's how I used to send the client their end-of-project summary).

I still probably lost months of historical work that I never got back...which actually showed how little of the archive material I actually ever went back for - but it is handy when a old client comes back and says "...remember that project we did in 2010..."!