baloo file indexing daemon closed unexpectedly

[Grahm]

I am getting this error message since yesterday, during the beginning of each session of 20.04

baloo file indexing daemon closed unexpectedly

I close it and move on, nothing happened so far. But I wanted to ask why this error is happening now all of a sudden. Is there anything I should do ? Because I see the same error in OpenSUSE, Arch Linux and Manjaro when I tried Google. Hopefully I am in safe waters. Thanks.

[jglen490]

Probably a database error. There's very likely a way to rebuild its database, but I don't know. I'm surprised the solution didn't show up in the Google search.

I put baloo out of its misery a long time ago, and have not missed it.

Someone else probably has a solution, just wanted to give a little editorial commentary on baloo

[mr_raider]

sudo balooctl disable

[Grahm]

Ok. Shall I do that ? It shows a crashed message every time I log in.

[Grahm]

I'm surprised the solution didn't show up in the Google search.

I didn't try them because they were not Kubuntu / KDE forums.

[mr_raider]

Ok. Shall I do that ? It shows a crashed message every time I log in.

That disables baloo. It does not solve the underlying problem.

[Grahm]

Ok. Nice to know that it will get rid of the error. Will disabling Baloo cause any problems to normal functioning of the system ?

[jlittle]

To stop the crashes, clear out the baloo directory, .local/share/baloo (I think, I'm on my phone atm).
The search function in dolphin uses baloo, and if it's disabled it won't work. But, there's alternatives under "more find tools", though searching by content or metadata might be hard to find.
A lot of us here turn it off; there's lots of rants on KFN you can look up, so I won't add to them now.

[Grahm]

Thanks. I somehow missed this reply. .local/share/baloo has 2 files

1. index which is 65 MiB
2. index-lock 8.0 KiB

I should delete these files, right ?

[jlittle]

Thanks. I somehow missed this reply. .local/share/baloo has 2 files

1. index which is 65 MiB
2. index-lock 8.0 KiB

I should delete these files, right ?

Yes. If you let baloo run again, it will recreate them. In my experience, this is very quick and baloo runs well after that, till the next time it screws up, which for me was usually a few days. After one screw up was writing continuously to the index file, at about 80 MB/s, I feared my SSD would be killed and haven't run baloo since.

But, I'm accustomed to using grep for content searching, and have little need for searching metadata or documents or spreadsheets. In principle, I think generic searching using extensible components that handle various types of files and that generate keys suitable for a single index is a good idea, maybe even essential for some users with lots of data; but IMO the design of baloo leads to unreliability inevitably.

[jglen490]

In other words, baloo is more of a pain in the butt than it's worth.

[TWPonKubuntu]

In other words, baloo is more of a pain in the butt than it's worth.

I think that is accurate, baloo is kind of like the stereotypical grey haired librarian trying to keep order and Quiet! in the system. I remember them from my childhood. There are other ways to run a computer system.

[Grahm]

I deleted those files. 2 sessions now, there is no crash message so far. At one point, a couple of other errors too started appearing with baloo crash error. Now there is none.