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![]() ![]() I don’t know what it is with the recent releases of macOS and disks, but it’s been a complete disaster. Yet somehow the disk is “in use” and cannot be safely ejected. None of its files is currently open anywhere. None of its volumes is currently mounted. It’s not that I want to be able to search my Time Machine backup-I wish I could disable indexing on that volume entirely-but that, with a damaged index file, indexing may keep running continuously. I’m not keen on doing that, though, because I don’t want to corrupt the index file. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get Spotlight to stop, other than to kill the mds process and then try to unmount the drive before it respawns. So what is the program which is using the disk? The Spotlight indexer, it turns out. Unfortunately when this happens, there is no help for it: even closing all applications does not stop the mystery program from using it. ![]() And then there are the other stretches of time when this has been impossible: clicking the eject button in Finder does nothing for a few ponderous moments and then shows a force eject dialog. There are long stretches of time when I don’t even think about this because it works just fine. I use a USB hard drive for backups, which of course needs unplugging when I want to take the machine with me somewhere. The bigger problem is that sometimes Finder does show that it ejected, but then when I switch off the drive I get a warning saying that I ejected a drive that was still in use.Įver since upgrading to a recent Mac that came with the disk formatted with AFPS, a perennial irritation has been Time Machine. Typically, I don’t get an error message at all-it just doesn’t eject. ![]() This has been happening a lot for me since Catalina. Most importantly, if you click its padlock at the lower right and authenticate, it will show all processes running as root. Although it’s not notarized, it does everything that I’d want in terms of matching lsof or fuser’s features. My personal favourite of them all is Sloth, from here. It’s unusual for this not to work at all, although it may take a couple of attempts. In Disk Utility, the answer seems to be to try again, several times if necessary. Among the rough edges in macOS is that infuriating message you may see when you try to eject or unmount a volume: it failed because the volume is in use. ![]()
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