Permanently disable Spotlight on disk that is used with rsync I'm using rsync to mirror files from my internal drive to an external USB hard drive. This is the command I'm using:

/usr/local/bin/rsync --archive --exclude='.DS_Store' --delete-after --progress --stats /Files/ /Volumes/BACKUP2014B


So files not on the main HDD will be deleted from the backup disk. This means that the files telling Spotlight to ignore the external disk will be deleted at every sync. Is there some way to avoid that? I don't like the fact that Spotlight reindexes my drive every day, it's a lot of disk crunching.
Things to try...


Set the .metadata_never_index file to stationery or locked
Put the entire backup structure inside a folder called myBackup.noindex
Add it to the Privacy pane in Spotlight settings. [I don't know where that data is stored - if it's on the boot drive, then it will work, if it's on the relevant external drive, back to 1 &amp; 2]