Nepomuk/RemovableMediaHandling

Nepomuk can also index your removable media devices. This includes popular devices such as portable hard disks as well as network storages. Over the last release, Nepomuk has changed the way it internally handles removable media. This page highlights the current mechanism and what you can expect from it.

Configurable Indexing

On connecting a new removable media, Nepomuk will ask you if you want to index that medium. You can choose to do so over there or you can go to System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Indexing -> Customize Folders and select the folder it mounted on.

You can even additionally configure which folders should be indexed in that removable media.

Mount points

With KDE Workspaces 4.10.0, Nepomuk does NOT support changing of mount points. If the mount point changes. This feature might be added in one of the point releases, otherwise it will be added in the next major release.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nepomuk still accesses the removable media even though it has been told to "Ignore all Removable Media". What's wrong?

By selecting that option Nepomuk will not index the contents of the removable device. It still needs to install file monitoring watches in order to preserve the metadata of any file that is moved from or to the removable media. In the case when indexing is disabled in Removable Media, the metadata is just the tags and ratings.

With the 4.10 release, Nepomuk does not offer a public way to disable this. With 4.11 we plan to include more user visible options and a better interface. For now, however, you can do so by editing the nepomukstrigirc file and adding -

[RemovableMedia]
add watches=false

With this no watches will ever be installed on a removable media and you will loose your metadata if the file is moved. Additionally, Nepomuk will not be able to automatically index a file when it is created or modified.

I cannot unmount my removable media. lsof says 'nepomukservice' is using it.

This a bug in Nepomuk that has been a little hard to fix cause it cannot be accurately reproduced. It is being caused by file monitoring watches which have been added, but could not be removed. If you want to disable adding watches on removable media all together, please add the following to your nepomukstrigirc

[RemovableMedia]
add watches=false

Nepomuk creates a large amount of traffic on network shares during startup?

Nepomuk has to install watches on Network Shares in order to watch for changes in files and to get notified whenever a file is moved from or into a network share. If you want to disable this, you can do so by adding the following option to the nepomukstrigirc file.

[RemovableMedia]
add watches network share=false