{"id":465,"date":"2019-07-12T20:33:08","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T08:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/?p=465"},"modified":"2019-07-12T20:34:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T08:34:00","slug":"constant-external-usb-disk-activity-under-macos-os-x-list-files-being-accessed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/constant-external-usb-disk-activity-under-macos-os-x-list-files-being-accessed\/","title":{"rendered":"Constant External USB Disk Activity Under macOS \/ OS X &#8211;  list files being accessed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Plugging in an external hard drive usually results in Spotlight indexing the contents &#8211; or just upgrading the index that already exists. This can be avoided by excluding the hard drive from being indexed under <strong>System Preferences &#8211; Spotlight &#8211; Privacy<\/strong> if desired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But, most often than not, we actually <em>need<\/em> to use Finder to find file on our drives, so having Spotlight build and keep the index up-to-date is quintessential. It can surely be one of the culprits keeping our drives busy when the system is idle &#8211; however, not <em>the <\/em>only one!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To check what processes are accessing what files on our disks in realtime, we can use <strong>fs_usage<\/strong> and pipe it through <strong>grep <\/strong>to narrow down the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Open a <strong>Terminal<\/strong> and substitute <code>Triforce<\/code> with the name of your external drive (or any other mount point, really). It has to be done as root, so we are using <strong>sudo<\/strong> to elevate our rights &#8211; meaning that you will have to enter your password first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><code>sudo fs_usage |grep Triforce<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This will keep churning out access data regarding all processes that touch your external drive in any way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To stop \/ quit, press <strong>CTRL + C<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plugging in an external hard drive usually results in Spotlight indexing the contents &#8211; or just upgrading the index that already exists. This can be avoided by excluding the hard drive from being indexed under System Preferences &#8211; Spotlight &#8211; Privacy if desired. But, most often than not, we actually need to use Finder to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.gaborhargitai.hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}