I am not sure about you, when I use Spotlight to launch my applications I am getting Duplicates from My Time Machine Drive as well as my Super-duper Cloned Drive. This only happened when my MacBook is connected to the external Dives I use for this, but it is still very frustrating. To make sure This does not happen to me I followed the instructions I found over at A New Mac Tip Every Day.
- Open System Preferences.
- Choose Spotlight.
- Click on the Privacy tab.
- Click on the “+”.
- Navigate to your backup disk and find the folder called “Backups.backupdb”.
- Click “Choose”.
- That’s it. The backup should now be excluded from Spotlight searches.
You can do the same for any location that you don’t want Spotlight to index.
March 16, 2008
This works, until the time machine is reconnected. It doesn’t stick.
January 26, 2009
Spotlight should be indexing your time machine backup, its how time machine is able to search through your backup files. Otherwise a search in time machine would yield no results as they have not been indexed.
If it is indexing for a while its probably following a deep traversal.
March 18, 2010
You should let it do this. Get Quicksilver to launch apps if it’s a big problem. Quicksilver works great for me. I just hit F5, begin typing part of the app (or any file) name and it pops up.
Example: http://grab.by/38Jb
Good stuff!