Automatically Mount/Unmount Hard Drives

I’m looking to only have my external hard drives mount overnight. One hard drive is for archiving and one is for Time Machine. I’m using a MacBook Air with external display and I’m constantly moving around with my laptop so having to unmount hard drives throughout the day gets annoying. My thought is that if the MacBook Air is connected to my Thunderbolt dock overnight, I would like it to mount the hard drives so Time Machine and Backblaze can do their thing. Is Keyboard Maestro the best way to achieve this?

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I would have thought Automator would be the best option.

There’s also Automounter - not sure if it unmounts drives. I bought it but in the end I used Automator to create a script to mount my NAS on startup.

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I don’t know if KM is the best way, but it works for me. I’ve got a macro that mounts an external SSD every night at 8:30 using a shell script action. Duplicating that and editing it to unmount the same SSD at a later time would be a trivial task.

You can try Automounter, the free version is really fully functional. I don’t know if it will help you. I use it to automatically mount a series of Windows shares at work when I start my VPN and automatically unmount them when I close the VPN.

You also might want to look at Jettison. It will automatically unmount your drives before you Mac goes to sleep, so closing the cover would be enough to get them unmounted.

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Jettison seems like the perfect solution. I’m going to give that a try.

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