Any way to keep Spotlight privacy settings on clone?

[neilio]

One major issue with Mac OS X 10.4 that's kind of annoying is that it seems impossible to stop Spotlight from re-indexing a volume after its been cloned to.

This is what I tried to do to ensure that it wouldn't be indexed:

1. Ran a completely fresh clone to volume "a".
2. Allowed Spotlight to completely index volume "a" (this is necessary to add it to the privacy tab)
3. Added volume "a" to the Spotlight Privacy tab.
4. Ran the mdutil command line commands to also set volume "a" to ignore.
5. Created a tweaked Smart Update script that didn't clone over the .Spotlight-VT100 folder.
6. Ran the new script to update the cloned copy on volume "a".
7. On reboot, Spotlight merrily went off and started indexing volume "a" again.

ARG. I know Apple needs to fix Spotlight (already filed a radar), but is there any way to clone volumes while maintaining privacy settings?

[dnanian]

Unfortunately, we don't (yet) have the ability to leave a folder "untouched" on a volume. As such, when you ignore the .Spotlight... folder, it ends up being removed.

This whole area of Spotlight is annoying, and we're trying to come up with ways of handling it. (We've also filed bugs against it.) Our disable_spotlight script -- which uses mdutil -- does turn the indexing off for the volume, but it's still searched... and whatever the privacy tab is doing is not documented, so we don't want to "hack" it in there...