Disable Spotlight Indexing on a Volume in OS X Revision as of Thursday, 28 May 2026 at 13:06 UTC

Like a Boss

Let’s say our drive is called (and mounted as) Backup Drive. Open up a terminal window:

cd "/Volumes/Backup Drive"
touch .metadata_never_index

Et voila!

Via System Preferences

1. Go to System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy
2. Drag the volume into the list
3. Ta da!