Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Hi All,
Ever since I've installed OS X Mountain Lion, I cannot eject my time machine backups disk. I connect through usb and EVERY time I try to eject it I get a popup box with the following in it:
The disk "Time Machine Backups" wasn't ejeted because one or more programs may be using it.
What the heck? It isn't backing up currently or anything else. This worked fine until I upgraded to mountain lion.
Thanks for any info!
Programs like TextEdit and Pages do autosave now. I suspect (not sure) they use the Time Machine backup disk as part of this process.
I've seen this too. You should be given the option to force-eject. Don't do this if a backup is in progress, of course.
Problem solved! It was actually spotlight service using the time machine backup. I searched the internet and found some info on this. I 'forced quit' the process in activity monitor (called 'mds') and it worked....now I was successfully able to eject the time machine backup drive. Now, it must take days for this to index the drive but, I want to be able to eject my time machine drive whenever it is done backing up so that I can take my macbook to different rooms without having to carry the drive!
Thanks for posting your solution! Very informative and interesting. Nice tracking down too.
Thanks so much i was just about to ask the same question, i just got a back up drive for my macbook pro and i needed to know if i could eject the drive. Thanks!
I'm sure there are a number of circumstances that can cause this. However, I noticed that if I'm running VMware Fusion when I try to eject my Time Machine drive, I get this error. When I quit VMware, I can usually eject the drive (without force ejecting).
I'm also using VMware ("...Horizon Client", by now) but quitting it didn't help.
Quitting mds in "Activity Monitor" did help though, thanks for that tip!
On OS X "El Capitan" (10.11.2) by now. Problem only recently started showing up. Was worried that the drive started failing but that might not be the case.
The same problem (backup drive would not eject) was also solved for me when I quit "mds" in "Activity Monitor". But does this mean that spotlight is no longer working for my hard drive? Should I turn "mds" back on? If so, how do I do that?
I used 'fuser' to identify the process that has a file open in the file system, and got nothing. So I used the 'force eject'. Perhaps the kernel has a bug in its reference-count logic.
Try using 'fuser /Volumes/<file system name>' from a 'Terminal' window to identify the process ID (PID) number. Once you have a set of PIDs, use 'ps -fp <PID>' to get the process name(s).
Of you can use 'sudo lsof /Volumes/<file system name>' (and enter your password when prompted). This will give you the command that is using the drive, the pid, user, file description, and the name of what is being used on that filesystem (among other things).
Essentially, lsof does in one command what you'd need to do with several (in addition to making not of the pids in question).
Unable to Eject Time Machine Backups Disk
