How do I disable file indexing?

How can I disable file indexing in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

Solution 1:

System Settings > Privacy > disable Record Activity (in the bottom-right-corner).

Solution 2:

Zeitgeist developer here, I would like to clear up things. (This is a bit of a geeky reply.)

Zeitgeist does not index files. There is no concept of file indexing or tracking. You need tracker for that.

What zeitgeist does is log the events and the related URI for an event. In case you deal with files, the URI of the file is logged. The indexing service called FTS++ (code name) uses these URI and exposes an API which can be used to do a search on your file history.

Please note that this indexing service runs as a part of zeitgeist and does not deal with files. It just provides a full text search capability on the URI. This indexing service does not search inside the file or its contents.

To avoid logging and subsequent indexing, open Activity Log Manager and set the Switch of Record Activity to Off.

Solution 3:

The settings in System Settings > Privacy do not affect the results displayed in the Files & folders lens.

Even after I:

1. Switch "Record Activity" to "Off"
2. Check every box under "Don't record activity for the following type of files"
3. Clear all history.

The only way to prevent it from being displayed is to uninstall the lens: unity-lens-files. You might want to uninstall all lenses apart from unity-lens-applications.

I think to prevent the system from recording these logs altogether you need to remove the zeitgeist packages. Although some core applications, such as nautilus, depend on the libzeitgeist package and can not be removed.