What Is Index Volumes Command on a Mac?
Mac OS X includes Spotlight, an indexing technology that creates a fast, searchable directory of the files on your hard drive. Tied into the underlying disk write architecture, Spotlight is triggered every time a file is created or modified. System Preferences provides control over which drives are indexed and allows for reindexing.
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Spotlight Architecture
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Spotlight is created and updated by a background process on Mac OS X that manages its indexes behind the scenes. Spotlight creates a master index when Mac OS X is first installed or when the operating system is upgraded to a version that includes a newer implementation of Spotlight. After the master index is created, the background process watches for changes to the hard drive and updates the index incrementally as needed.
Spotlight Displays
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Spotlight doesn't normally display a progress bar indicating its status. However, when a large indexing operation is taking place, a blinking dot appears in the center of the Spotlight magnifying glass on the right side of the menu bar. Clicking on this icon normally brings up the Spotlight menu, but during reindexing, a progress bar is displayed instead. Smaller indexing operations won't display the blinking dot or impede Spotlight searches. During any indexing operation, the Activity Monitor application shows CPU usage by Spotlight under the process "mds," the system utility that handles indexing.
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Managing Spotlight Indexing
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Spotlight doesn't provide user interaction to manually control the indexing process. Instead, Mac OS X offers a privacy option that can exclude drives from Spotlight indexing. Open System Preferences from the dock and click the Spotlight icon, then click the "Privacy" tab. Drag folders and volumes into the list of excluded locations to stop Spotlight indexing on these locations. This is also the method of forcing a new index for any drive or folder: Add the location to the privacy list to delete its index, wait five minutes for Mac OS X to implement this action, then highlight the location and click the "-" button to add it back to Spotlight. Everything stored on that drive or in that folder will then be reindexed.
Other Volume Indexing
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You may also see a reference to volume indexes on a Mac during a drive repair in the Disk Utility application. The HFS+ method of writing to hard drives maintains low-level indexes on the disk to maintain the integrity of all files. Mac OS X will automatically check these indexes during startup and Disk Utility testing, repairing them as necessary. Unlike the indexing used by Spotlight, Mac users have no reason to interact directly with these indexes.
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