What to Do When macOS Won’t Let You Unmount a Volume
When all else fails, the next step is to identify what’s using files on that volume or disk, so you can decide whether to force quit that process in Activity Monitor. Don’t do that blindly, as you could end up killing processes that your Mac does need to run.
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If you’d rather use an app, then my personal favourite is Sloth from here. Although it’s not notarized, it does everything that I’d want in terms of matching
lsoforfuser’s features. Most importantly, if you click its padlock at the lower right and authenticate, it will show all processes running as root.
I like Sloth, but it’s annoying to have to authenticate each time I use it. There’s a preference to have it prompt at launch so that at least you don’t have to click the little padlock icon each time (or forget to click it and get incorrect results).
In practice, I almost never had problems with volumes that wouldn’t eject before Sequoia, and now it happens multiple times per day. The culprits are always mds (Spotlight) and revisionsd (file versioning) so there seems to be nothing to do except Force Eject.
See also: TidBITS-Talk.
Previously:
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One drive of mine refuses to eject every single time. I've tried every method to figure out which program has which file open and there are never any files open. Never happened before Sequoia. I suspect it's a bug with the Finder.
always always always happens in Apple Photos I guess because my photos are on an external SSD. I have to shut down iMac (current o/s) to unplug it. Probably endlessly syncing to iCloud ?
I often check if it's QuickLook: lsof /Volumes/My_Drive
Then: killall -KILL QuickLookUIService
Always works.
What do non-tech people do when this happens? The options are basically just yank it out and pray or a full reboot.
This is at least pretty bad user experience design. Again something that is problematic for years and will probably never be fixed by Apple.
"...I often check if it's QuickLook: lsof /Volumes/My_Drive
Then: killall -KILL QuickLookUIService
Always works..."
Drew, they wouldn't happen to WD drives would they?
Just reminding people who come here to have a look at the app Jettison (https://stclairsoft.com/Jettison/) that tries to alleviate this problem.
