Greetings! Every Friday afternoon, I plug a Samsung Portable SSD T7 into my MacBook Pro (14", 2021) and do a Time Machine backup. When I did this yesterday, the backup ran as usual, but when I went to eject the T7, I got a dialog box saying that “The disk ‘T7’ wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.” It gave me the option to “Force Eject,” so I waited for a while to see if anything would change and eventually took that option.
This morning I tried again (after restarting the computer) and got the same result. Some Google results suggested using alternate methods to eject the disk, either right-clicking on the desktop icon or using Disk Utility. These produced the same result as dragging the drive to the trash. I also tried logging out and logging back in, to no avail.
This is the first time I’ve backed up since installing MacOS 15.1–not sure if that could be relevant.
Is this a real problem? Can I just “force eject” every Friday instead of regular eject? Could there be something wrong with the drive? (It has plenty of space, so it’s not that.)
If you’re happy using the Terminal you can use the lsof command to see what is using the disk to help troubleshoot.
e.g: sudo lsof /Volumes/T7/
I noticed after upgrading to 15 my T5 was being indexed by spotlight for some reason so had to explicitly exclude it.
That shouldn’t be the case here as it shouldn’t index time machine volumes anyway.
I quit any program that I think might be using the disk drive, including Finder windows pointing to the disk drive. I do have my always-connected hourly backup drive excluded from Spotlight. (Good one, @aardy!)
If that doesn’t work, I try to eject the drive using the Disk Utility app.
Lately I have been having good luck with St Clairsoft’s app called Jettison.
If all else fails, I shut down the Mac. I pull the cable to the disk drive after making sure all power is off to the Mac and to any docks or hubs.
I would avoid force ejecting over and over again. This will come back to bite you eventually.
I don’t know what most of that means, but it kind of looks like Spotlight is the problem, as @aardy suspected.
So then I went to System Settings → Spotlight → Search Privacy to try to add the drive to the (currently empty) “Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations” list. But when I try to add the drive to that list, I get the message: “Privacy List Error: The item couldn’t be added or removed because of an unknown error.”
Similar situation, but not with my TM disk, my issue is with my external Photos disk. First, I closed all apps via the dock that could be using that disk. I confirmed that this disk is on the Privacy List for Spotlight but when I run the sudo command, mds is running on this disk anyway.
This is the only disk in my JBOD that has this issue. What am I doing wrong? I’d rather not shut down every time I want to safely eject this disk.
I’m having this issue now after I just upgraded to Sequoia 15.2. Since I switch disks multiple times a day, shutting down is not an option. I should have followed my own advice to never upgrade macOS before Oscar night…
