Thousands of skg_events files written into my Google Drive folder after macOS upgrade (Spotlight)

Since October 2025, Drive for desktop 116 lets Spotlight index your Drive files on macOS 26+.

The skg_events_*.journal and .toc files are macOS Spotlight's "Knowledge Events" index journal.

They belong in ~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents.

But updating OS seem to confuse Spotlight to the point that it rebuilds its index wherever the ****.

On my Mac, Spotlight decided the root of my Google Drive folder would have made a nicer home for them.

So 85 minutes after I upgraded macOS, Spotlight wrote 321,000 files into my Drive folder over 13 hours while I was asleep.

So I woke up to an everything is frozen situation, 99% CPU 0 RAM left and processes impossible to kill.

Cool.

Fix:

Quit Drive for desktop (all processes from CLI otherwise it respawns).

Do not delete through Finder or the Drive web UI unless you want to spend days on it.

Drive API files.delete via the batch endpoint, 100 per request, 30 requests in parallel.

Roughly 10,000 files a minute, so 320k is gone in half an hour. Keeps you under the limit.

To stop it from coming back: System Settings → Spotlight → Search Privacy → add your Google Drive folder.

Hope this helps

Posted on Sep 22, 2026 2:49 AM

1 reply

clhodgson

Level 1 (8 points)

Oct 25, 2026 4:27 PM in response to Cenerebianca

I had the same experience and it took me 2 days to figure out how to remove all of the files from Google Drive. I added my Google drive folder to the Search privacy box in system settings to block it from happening again - restarted my computer and it started to create the files all over again! Beware that the search Privacy block does not seem to be enough.