[P]

I recently moved my desk and the entire computer setup in my office. This meant that I unplugged everything and plugged it back in in the new spot. The drive used for Time Machine backups is now in a different port on the USB hub, and as a result, Spotlight thinks that it's a great idea to index the backup drive. All. The. Time. While that doesn't hurt performance the way it did on the G5 (I truly can't notice if I have music on), it's annoying that the drive never spins down.

I tried adding the drive to the privacy settings - no difference (it was already in there by the way). I tried adding the backup directory to the privacy settings - error message about the list being corrupt. I deleted the settings file for that drive and tried again - no difference.

So: How do I fix this? Is there some more settings file to delete? Some different trick for disabling indexing of one drive?

[Hal Itosis]

Any error messages in system.log emanating from processes such as mds, mdworker or mdimport (etc)?

BTW, i think Time Machine and Spotlight have some relationship whereby —even if we try to use privacy settings (or mdutil) to prevent indexing —it will still index the Backups.backupd directory.

How about repairing the backup drive with Disk Utility? [and/or DiskWarrior]
Else (obviously) erase it and start your backups from scratch.

[P]

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

Any error messages in system.log emanating from processes such as mds, mdworker or mdimport (etc)?

Good point. mdworker says "Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in doictionary" a lot, but it doesn't say which plist file it's referring to. So some plist-file is broken? Fine, I'll delete it and fix it that way, but which file?

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

BTW, i think Time Machine and Spotlight have some relationship whereby —even if we try to use privacy settings (or mdutil) to prevent indexing —it will still index the Backups.backupd directory.

No problem, but it never finishes indexing - it just sits there saying 3 hours left.

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

How about repairing the backup drive with Disk Utility? [and/or DiskWarrior]

I checked it yesterday, and it was just fine. Checked it again now, and it says "invalid Node structure". Whoops. Nuked it and redoing backups now, but I don't like this. The HD is almost brand new, and it developed a directory fault already? Not good.

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

Else (obviously) erase it and start your backups from scratch.

I am doing that now, as you can see above.

Funny thing is, these are all things I usually advice people to do. For some reason I was looking for a silver bullet when it came to my own problem. Thanks for getting me to think, Hal.

[Hal Itosis]

Ha det bra.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Hal Itosis 

Ha det bra.

For some reason, this made me laugh.

[Simon]

Men varför?

[Oisín]

Ingen aning.