[itistoday]

It seems like there's no way to stop Spotlight from indexing your hard drive. Am I the only one who does not have any need for this "feature"? I have several million documents on my hard drive, but I know where I can find everything I need. I don't like the idea of something running in the background wasting resources to index files, as well as allowing unwanted users to quickly find documents I don't want them to see (imagine letting someone use your computer, only to come back and find out they typed in 'password' into spotlight, which conveniently reveals to them many confidential results; it'll even read your email!).

I think Apple should at least allow people the ability to disable it...

[CubeWannaB]

You can probably disable Spotlight by marking your entire hard drive as a folder to ignore.

However, your perception of how spotlight builds its database is flawed: it does not need to continuously index your hard drive. It does this once when you install Tiger and that is all. Spotlight is integrated with the filesystem so once the initial index is built updates are made only as required when an actual file changes. To turn spotlight off at this level is impossible, I imagine, and would not yield any performance benefits.

Lastly, your example of insecurity for someone using your computer while you are away is irrelevant: said person could search your email now if you left them alone with your Mac. There are very few locations that a password would be stored and if you are saving your passwords in files on your hard drive they could be found in older versions of OS X. If saving passwords to you hard drive is your idea of security you have more to worry about than Spotlight.

[memory-minus]

Quit with the FUD...

Adding your hard drive(s) under the "Privacy" tab in the Spotlight system preference pane will not only disable search of those volumes, but will delete any previously built index and prevent "real time" indexing. You can also uncheck all search categories under the "Search Results" tab which will retain your indexes, but disable search. Or both for good measure. Turn the keyboard shortcuts while you're at it. There is no conspicuous GUI method to remove the Spotlight menu bar item, however -- I'm sure a 3rd party hack will come out to do this.

You should keep your passwords in your keychain.

Personally, I adore Spotlight and wonder how I ever located anything / functioned without it.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by CubeWannaB

To turn spotlight off at this level is impossible

step 1) open terminal
step 2) cd <some path in coreservices or metadata.framework>
step 3) sudo rm -rf md*

result: no spotlight, plus some whining in console from the system about how it can't find it

[itistoday]

Originally Posted by memory-minus

Quit with the FUD...

Adding your hard drive(s) under the "Privacy" tab in the Spotlight system preference pane will not only disable search of those volumes, but will delete any previously built index and prevent "real time" indexing. You can also uncheck all search categories under the "Search Results" tab which will retain your indexes, but disable search. Or both for good measure. Turn the keyboard shortcuts while you're at it. There is no conspicuous GUI method to remove the Spotlight menu bar item, however -- I'm sure a 3rd party hack will come out to do this.

You should keep your passwords in your keychain.

Personally, I adore Spotlight and wonder how I ever located anything / functioned without it.

Wow, thanks for the info! I never read anywhere about this so I assumed there was no way to do it. How many times more must I learn not to make an ASS-out of-U-and-ME?

For the record I keep most of my passwords stored in a third party app that uses 488-bit blowfish encryption (I don't like Keychain much). It's just that I'm sure there are a lot of people who do actually store their passwords in files, and I wouldn't be surprised if I have one hidden from times long since past that I'm not aware of.

CubeWannaB: I'm aware of how Spotlight works. However, updating the index every time a file is modified could lead to some kind of performance hit, even if it is minimal, and I'd rather not spare processor cycles on something that I'll never use anyway. Oh, and old versions of OS X could not easily find passwords if they were stored in obscurely named files. The problem with Spotlight is that it actually reads the contents of the files. In addition, I should add that the index file most likely takes up a lot of hard drive space.

[Detrius]

What part of "no Tiger support threads" do you people not understand? The fact that the ship date has been announced does not change the fact that it has not been released. If you can't figure something out, then ask Apple through your normal developer channels.