[X-Newbies] Re: Wait! I have a new question!

[Michael Winter]

On May 23, 2005, at 10:14 PM, Charles Martin wrote:

>> From: Michael Winter <winter at mac.com>
>> I haven't tried it out yet, but theoretically Spotlight can be used to
>> index removable disks and save the index to a local (boot only?) 
>> drive.
>
> Uh, no.
>
> I'm not sure why Michael wants to talk theoreticals when it would be 
> the work of a few seconds to find this out for himself, but Spotlight 
> can certainly be used to create a list of what's on a given disk -- 
> but that disk MUST BE CONNECTED each time you re-open the search, so 
> that it may update. If the disk is not present, then the search will 
> be updated to <null>.

That's the default behavior now. It keeps things simple -which is good. 
A "simple" change of the Spotlight code (or change in a settings file) 
however and the behavior changes. The APIs underlying Spotlight are 
very powerful, and there's no technical reason it couldn't be used for 
indexing and searching removable media. In fact, 3rd parties could even 
write an app that would tap into the APIs to do just that.

I understand the reasoning for Apple not indexing and keeping track of 
all removable media as a default behavior. That could get very messy. 
But I'll stand by my statement that "theoretically Spotlight can be 
used to index removable disks and save the index to a local (boot 
only?) drive."

-Mike