How do I safely disconnect my portable hard drive from my Mac?

right click on the icon of you external drive that appears on the screen and click "eject device"

Drag the drive icon to the Trash, it will change to an Eject symbol.

Always shut down, eject, disable, etc, before unplugging. I.e., software off before hardware off.

okay, i'll bite... what is the drive icon?

i'm serious, you know! i've tried dragging everything i see to the trash. the little box on the desktop that is the harddrive obviously. can you throw that away? and nothing says eject. i tried to drag the phone to the trash on iphoto, but that didn't do it either. iphoto is the ony place my phone shows up. please help me?

The little box on the desktop at the top right of the screen you cannot eject.

Any other icon of this type you can drag to the trash.

Or, if you have a mouse that you can right click, just do that. The menu that comes up will show many options, including Eject, for a hard drive.

If syncing is finished you can just disconnect it.

Generally, you manage iPhones thru iTunes. The iPhone icon (sim. to what you see in iPhoto) is listed in the sidebar under Devices. click on the round symbol to the right of the icon (looks like an upward pointing triangle w/ an underline). Sidebar is enabled in the View menu.

Thank you! So crazy that I have been struggling with this for one year, when all I had to do is ask for help 🙂

where is drive icon