@ismh mentioned that he keeps his clone backup drive unmounted. CCC offers the ability to unmount the drive after completing a backup, which is very handy. However, I was wondering what, if anything, he uses to prevent the drive from mounting automatically after restarting the computer?
I ask because I recently reinstalled the Mountain app to fill this role. Mountain does the job well, but it doesn’t seem to be under active development (the banner on the website says “ready for macOS High Sierra”).
I always did it by by creating/modifying my fstab file when I used platter style hard drives (I don’t bother now that all my external drives are SSDs). See the post below for an explanation of how to do it.
Why unmount the backup drive?
This episode inspired me to try a kind of light version of timeblocking–divide the day into sections—early morning, late morning, early, mid, and late afternoon, and so on. Because as David says otherwise it’s too easy for things to slide forever. I’m not quite ready to go to formal scheduling.
Unmounting it keeps it from cluttering up my list of external drives. It may also provide some protection from ransomeware.
Thanks for the shoutout for macnotesapp which lets you script Apple Notes with Python and also create/view notes from the terminal. If anyone tries it out and has feedback, let me know!
When I do a search it finds the files on my local drive and on the clone, so to avoid confusion I keep my clone drive unmounted. I use Keyboard Maestro to run an AppleScript to eject the clone drive at startup.
You can also exclude the backup drive from Spotlight
I just don’t want to see it all the time.
This too. I should have mentioned that in my reply. 
For those of us living the laptop-desktop lifestyle, it’s one less thing to unmount before yanking the cord and going mobile.
Speaking of which: Has anybody here actually personally seen bad things happen when disconnecting a drive without unmounting it first?
I’ve been disconnecting my MacBook and bringing it into the living room in the evening lately, so I’m dealing with the mounting/unmounting ritual daily.
I’m ashamed to say I’ve been doing it for years. But I’ll be the first one to tell you not to do it.
I’ve had to rescue data because I did that, though the last time was several years ago.
The worst thing I’ve seen is that my laptop scolds me when I do it.