Speed Up Your System and Save Your Hard Drive: Disable Tracker

Tracker is a tool designed to extract information and metadata about your personal files so that it can be searched easily and quickly. When using Tracker, you no longer have to remember where you've left your files. To locate a file you only need to remember something about it, such as a word in the document or the artist of the song. Traditional searching, by name and location, is also supported.

Tracker is turned on in Ubuntu by default. I personally turn it off because it uses up system resources that I don't want to spare and I don't keep a lot of data on my Mini. Other users have concerns with Tracker's wear and tear on their system drives. The Mini 9 ships with a solid-state hard drive that has a finite number of erase/write cycles that the flash memory can tolerate. There are also users who disable Tracker because they feel it is not a very good indexing program.

While I don't need an indexing program on my Mini, I have been testing Tracker on my desktop. I find that it works well.

But whatever your reason, disabling Tracker is easy.


To Stop Tracker From Loading on Start Up:
Under System>Preferences>Sessions

Uncheck both Tracker and Tracker Applet

To Disable Indexing:
Under System>Preferences>Search and Indexing

Uncheck both enable indexing and enable watching

Changes will take effect next time you restart your PC.

Remove Tracker
If you prefer you can chose to remove Tracker from your system:
In a terminal type

sudo apt-get remove tracker tracker-search-tool tracker-utils

For more information about solid-state hard drives.

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