Preventing Mac OS from eating flash-based drives…

As described in some detail at Ars Technica, Mac OS 10.5 will log all filesystem activity on a volume to a .fseventsd directory in the root of the volume. For removable media this is at best not helpful, and at worst actively damaging.

Luckily, as described also in the above article, this ‘feature’ can be disabled by creating a file named “no_log” in the “.fseventsd” directory.

The next thing to check is whether telling Spotlight to exclude “/Volumes” from its search paths will prevent removable drives being indexed whilst still maintaining indexing on the system drive…