Why is pycharm scanning my hard drive?
I have a Ubuntu 26.4 system with several partitions.
Some of those partitions are in huge HDD that I only mount occasioally, and when I mount them I see pycharm scanning them, because I can hear the HDD sounds.
Ovbiously my projects are not in those HDD, so there is zero reaso for pycharm scanning anything outside the project folder.
Are you indexing my computer without my permission?
Build data:
PyCharm 2026.2.1
Build #PY-262.9437.214, built on August 11, 2026
Source revision: e3fceeafe8ef7
Runtime version: 25.0.3+9-b508.16 amd64
VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o.
Toolkit: sun.awt.wl.WLToolkit
Linux 7.0.0-42-generic
Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS; glibc: 2.43; desktop: GNOME (GNOME Shell 50.1)
Exception reporter ID: 2101263c82786c9-1b51-4af2-a399-d2d0f3e1813a
JCEF version: 144.0.15-262-b37
GC: G1 Young Generation, G1 Concurrent GC, G1 Old Generation
Memory: 8048MiB
Cores: 32
Registry:
ide.experimental.ui=true
llm.chat.detached.compose.panel.cache.size=0
trace.state.event.service.url=https://api.jetbrains.cloud/trace-status
chat.run.target.promo.enabled=true
code.provenance.chatter.analytics.enabled=false
Non-Bundled Plugins:
Subversion (262.9437.286)
com.intellij.ml.llm (262.9437.276)
ru.adelf.idea.dotenv (262.9437.286)
PerforceDirectPlugin (262.8665.176)
hg4idea (262.8665.173)
nl.rubensten.texifyidea (1.1.0)
com.firsttimeinforever.intellij.pdf.viewer.intellij-pdf-viewer (0.18.5)
org.jetbrains.junie (262.2144.100)
com.intellij.mcpServer (262.9437.214)
Current Desktop: ubuntu:GNOME
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Santiago, PyCharm does not index the whole computer. It indexes project files, plus the libraries and the Python interpreter paths of open projects.
A test on PyCharm 2026.2.4 on Linux did not reproduce the disk activity. With no project pointing to the partition, the IDE read nothing from it after the mount, also after Reload All from Disk. With a symlink from a project to the partition, the mount alone caused no reads. The IDE read the linked folder only after Reload All from Disk, and nothing else on the partition.
The test ran on X11, not Wayland, with a small folder tree and without the plugins from this post. Two details are needed for this setup:
1) Does any open project use an interpreter, a library or a symlink on that partition? A symlink would match IJPL-206543.
2) Which process reads the disk? Install
fatracewithsudo apt install fatrace. Mount the partition. While the disk works, run:The output lists process names and file paths. This thread is public, so post only the process names.