Is it normal for Spotlight to re-index a drive?

messiahmessiah
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Every now and again, Spotlight insists on re-indexing my drive (the hard disk starts chugging away and if I go to the Spotlight menu I get the 'Spotlight will be available...' message that you get when you first install Tiger.



Is this normal behavior?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    No, it isn't.



    Try a permissions repair and clearing caches.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Thanks I'll try that.



    For some reason, a while back, my G5 kept decreasing the size of various mounted volumes. I had a 200GB drive attached via FireWire and the comptuer suddenly decided one day that it was an ~80GB drive and promptly reindexed it as such.



    I don't know what caused this, but I would have lost 120GB of data had I not had it backed up. Reformatting the drive brought it back to full capacity. I would have suspected the drive was going down, but it's now done it with four different drives connected via FireWire, USB and SATA.



    I run a small business, and the last thing I need is to lose data...
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