AppleScript - Unmount Timeout

First of all, the timeout clause is not a delay by itself but is intended to give the actual AppleScript command(s) that it encloses up to 900 seconds. A with timeout … end timeout with no enclosed command(s) does nothing, and falls through to the next command.

Secondly, If you are using an APFS formatted Time Machine drive, your eject command will eject every single backup in that drive, before it ejects the drive itself. If you do not want that, then you need to rephrase your command:

use scripting additions

# prevent these drives from being ejected
set excludes to {"Data", "TMX8_SUR"}

tell application "Finder"
	with timeout of 900 seconds
		get every disk whose ejectable is true and name is not in excludes and name does not end with "backup"
	end timeout
end tell
return



As Viking mentioned, with timeout does not cause a delay, it just allows the enclosing commands to take up to that time to execute before timing out.

If you want an actual delay in your script execution, use the delay command:

doSomething()
delay 15 * minutes 
doSomethingElse()

You can specify any time metric in the delay command. the default is seconds, but you can use 'minutes', 'hours', 'days', etc. to use other time scales.

What is this code for? What is it supposed to do, at a high level? Why do you need it?

You shouldn't ever get an error message saying a drive is in use by the Finder. That suggests there is something fundamentally wrong.

Mounting and unmounting volumes are tricky operations. You can't use timeouts at all. It might work half the time, but then you have a script that breaks half the time. Ideally, you associate some action with the result of mounting and unmounting, and execute that when the event occurs. But even here, these file system operations are not particularly reliable, so any script that uses this is likely to have a high failure rate.

No worries - I get that you didn't actually need a delay. I was just adding that comment for completeness in case you do need a delay later on, or if someone else with a similar question stumbles across this thread. :)

You are welcome.