When I try to eject Time Machine disk, it says "The disk Time Machine is in use and could not be ejected"....Time Machine is definitely closed and not backing up, how can I find out which application is using the disk?
Have you tried restarting the computer? If there's a task that's hanging onto the drive then that should clear it. It's not necessarily an application, but instead could be a system process such as spotlight indexing.
If you cannot eject it after a restart then try rebooting into safe mode by pressing the shift key at bootup. This should limit the number of startup processes to a minimum, and hopefully not load the one that's grabbing the drive.
the following terminal command will tell you which process is using the drive.
sudo lsof /Volumes/"TM-drive-name"
Put the name of your TM drive in the above. You'll need to enter your admin password too. Typical culprit is Spotlght. If you see mdworker or mds listed in the output, that's what it is.
If that's the case, put your TM drive in Spotlight's privacy pane. This will stop spotlight indexing of the drive but there is no good reason to have it indexed anyway.
does
not show all the files open on the Shiny volume. Apparently you
must omit the trailing slash.
lsof /Volumes/Shiny
Secondly my problem turned out to be, IMHO, a bug on Apple's part - Address Book was holding open a file. Earlier I'd showed a friend that Time Machine doesn't only apply to Finder but also to apps written to support it via CoreData.
It turns out that if you've used time machine on your Address Book, you may not eject the backup drive until you've quite Address Book. I suspect the same may be true of similar apps.
At any rate, once I'd figured out why lsof was giving me the wrong results, I tracked it down.
