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I tried the approach in How do I tell Spotlight not to index a particular folder? but it still indexes my SD card when I reinsert it into my card reader.

How do I stop this, either for all SD cards or for a particular one?

edit: It looks like I can do this either with that method or with mdutil, but I also need to delete all the hidden dotfiles (.Spotlight-V100 .Trashes ._.Trashes and .fseventsd) from the SD card -- this is for my Garmin GPS and the GPS somehow doesn't like the dotfiles.

When I delete those dotfiles, Mac OS X forgets that I have disabled Spotlight on the card.

Community
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Jason S
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  • possible duplicate of [How disable mac snow leopard creating .Spotlight-V100 and .Trash folders in USB Flash Drivers?](http://superuser.com/questions/89556/how-disable-mac-snow-leopard-creating-spotlight-v100-and-trash-folders-in-usb) – kenorb Apr 08 '15 at 11:07

2 Answers2

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See this site for the simple answer: create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root of the volume (once it is mounted).

Henno
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  • I believe he doesn't want *any* dotfiles on the external drive. – ghoppe Jun 28 '10 at 21:16
  • Maybe one empty dotfile is better than several non-empty ones? The files he mentions are non-empty... – Henno Jun 29 '10 at 04:47
  • Maybe. Couldn't hurt to try I suppose :) – ghoppe Jun 29 '10 at 16:03
  • I'm not sure how to deal with the issue... it's a moot point (for now) since I reformatted the card on a PC and haven't touched it with my Mac. – Jason S Jul 07 '10 at 20:48
  • Hmmm. This answer only prevents the .Spotlight-V100 directory, not the other dotfiles (.fseventsd, .Trashes ._.Trashes). – Jason S Jul 17 '10 at 13:03
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As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this. But there is a utility that can prevent these files from being written called Blue Harvest.

Edit: Here is a free solution called Hidden Cleaner.

ghoppe
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