Spotless For Mac

Spotless is a tool created to enable and disable Spotlight's auto indexing of volumes with the click of a button.

Spotlight indexing can cause major slow-downs on volumes that are used for backup purposes, video rendering, and a wide variety of tasks that involve the transfer of large amounts of data.

Spotless can effectively and indefinitely disable the indexing of volumes that you specify. Even if the volume is a removable device, the indexing status is remembered when you remount it - even on a different computer!

Simply adding volumes to Spotlight's privacy list does not achieve the same results as using Spotless. You may cause the Metadata Server to crash, and the volumes may be indexed the next time you mount them.

Spotless allows you to delete existing Spotlight indexes. This will free up the space used by the index files on volumes that are no longer being indexed. You may also delete indexes on volumes that are being indexed. This will cause Spotlight to reindex the volume - especially useful if your index becomes damaged.

Spotless will automatically find and delete the "mds-crash-state" file from selected volumes. The file may be created if the Metadata Server crashed or was unexpectedly closed during the indexing process. The presence of this file can prevent Spotlight from indexing the volume in the future.

One of the great features of Spotless is that he is able to show you the exact size of the index directory on each volume.

Spotless also includes an on/off switch for Spotlight. Please note that if you turn Spotlight off completely, searching will not be available until Spotlight is turned back on. This includes the "find" functionality of the Finder.

You should only disable Spotlight if you really do not want Spotlight running on your computer. If you need to have a "find" feature, we recommend EasyFind by Devon Technologies.