Question / complaint : How to stop Searchlight from indexing TimeMachine snapshots?
Apple needs to gives us mortal users a way to stop Spotlight indexing for TimeMachine backups. By mortal, I mean users who cannot afford 20 TB SSDs and who rely on ordinary USB spinning disks for backups. I mention this because every reindexing creates constant chatter for this drive. And apparently, it needs to completely reindex *every snapshot* on *every day*. One can see that it's doing this by running the "mount" utility, for instance, to see that dozens of snapshots have been mounted. The "lsof" utility can be used to verify that "mdsync" and "mds" are hard at work doing ... stuff.
This question has been asked and sort of answered here and here, but the answers no longer work in Monterey. Instead, when we try to add a Volume to be excluded from indexing using the Spotlight privacy settings, we get "“XXXX” is a Time Machine backup folder. You cannot add it to the privacy list." If we do it on the command line via mdutil, It says it succeeded, but in fact, status shows that the volume is still marked for indexing.
It's also frustrating that there is no built-in utility to modify the TimeMachine backup frequency -- like there was in the past (I was on El Capitan for 6 years).
My question also raises the meta-question: Do Mac developers ever use the technologies they create? Surely they would have noticed how annoying this becomes to an end-user? Or do they assume everyone has 20 TB SSDs like they do?
And if any such dev from Apple is reading this: consider incrementalizing the indexing of snapshot, in addition to being able to disable them. By incrementalize, I mean, don't reindex files that aren't part of the most recent snapshot. It appears the snapshot is mounted, and completely reindex, which (I'm guessing) requires all underlying snapshots to also be mounted and indexed.
MacBook Pro Apple Silicon
