66 Macworld • January 2022MACOS MONTEREY
example, cloning speed
might be half the rate you
expect or even lower. But
you can tell Spotlight to
keep its hands off while
performing operations
that it might otherwise
slow down. The secret is
the Spotlight preference
pane’s Privacy view
(System Preferences >
Spotlight > Privacy).
Apple uses the term
‘privacy’ to indicate you
don’t want items indexed
that are shown in the
volumes or folders list in
that view. But it’s really a
‘don’t index me’ list.
You can use the Privacy list in a
lot of ways:- Add external volumes that contain
backups, like networked Time
Machine volumes or local clones.
These don’t need to be indexed.
(Volumes that are entirely devoted to
Time Machine are already excluded,
but don’t show up in the list.) - Create or add folders that commonly
hold large numbers of temporary
files or are used for rapid reading
and writing of data that doesn’t
need to be indexed. I discovered in
using the Blackmagic Disk Speed
Test, a free app for determining
drive performance, that placing
its test file in a Spotlight-indexed
folder dramatically reduced tested
throughput compared to a folder
excluded from Spotlight.- When creating or updating a clone,
drag its volume icon to the list before
starting. You can remove it later,
but you likely don’t need the clone
indexed within the current start-up
volume’s system.
Drag an item into the Privacy view to add it, or click
the ‘+’ to select a folder or volume.