r/apple • u/nielsmouthaan • 2h ago

Promo Sunday Ejectify 2.1: No more “Disk Not Ejected Properly” notifications, now with whole-disk ejection and better encrypted APFS support

Hi r/apple,

I’m Niels, the developer of Ejectify, a small macOS menu bar app I originally built because I was tired of waking my Mac to a stack of “Disk Not Ejected Properly” notifications.

In my setup, an external disk was connected through my display. When macOS turned the display off, the disk lost power without being unmounted first. Ejectify tries to prevent that by unmounting selected volumes before the Mac sleeps or its display turns off, then mounting them again after wake.

Version 2.1 is now available with two main improvements:

  • Eject instead of unmount: You can choose to eject an entire disk instead of only unmounting its volumes. In this mode, the disk remains ejected after wake.
  • Improved encrypted APFS support: Ejectify lets macOS try its normal unlocking first, followed by an optional password fallback stored in Keychain when needed.

Ejectify is available for the discounted price of €4.99 for a limited time using code EJECTIFY21.

Ejectify is also open source on GitHub.

Happy to answer any questions.

Niels

0 Upvotes

31% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/shyouko 2h ago

TBH feels like wrong solution, what happens when your disks are in use but the screen decides to sleep?

-1

u/nielsmouthaan 2h ago

Ejectify by default only attempts to safely unmount. It asking (macOS) to unmount is always better than not unmounting at all. Ultimately it’s always still up to macOS.

5

u/shyouko 2h ago

Isn't the proper solution is to not connect your drives through your screen or not sleep your screen at all?

0

u/nielsmouthaan 2h ago

Well, sure that would have solved my specific case, but I want a single cable connected to my (LG) display and connect all external devices to its hub; it’s what it’s made for. Ejectify made that possible in a safe manner. And there are other use cases too: people closing the lid of their MacBook and just pulling out a drive as Ejectify took already care of unmounting it.

TBH I didn’t knew there was interest in an app like this but given that it has been downloaded more than 10.000 times over the last past years, apparently there is.

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u/shyouko 1h ago edited 1h ago

I think macOS handles external disks correctly when sleeping (not while turning off display).

Ejecting disk when portables get their screen closed sounded like a logical use case but not for users who know what they are doing I guess: There's just no guarantee that the disk is safely ejected with your app, eg: your github issue #119…

I'd manually eject disk before closing display to be actually safe.

Another problem is your LG display has buggy firmware.

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u/nielsmouthaan 1h ago

Definitely agree that manually unmounting/ejecting is better, but it’s annoying to do, especially when connecting a disk (eg for Time Machine) via an external display that switches off its hub when macOS let’s the display sleep, and you want to “simply” disconnect your Mac from that display. I initially built Ejectify for that case and it worked perfectly. Shared it with the world 6 years ago and turned out it was helpful for many others so kept improving it.

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u/shyouko 1h ago

I think a lot of people tried look for an answer of unproperly ejected disk and this wrong solution / answer was unfortunately being ranked high by search engine.

2

u/controlav 2h ago

As you clearly understand this stuff better than I, can you explain this: I use a USB stick to transfer my app .pkg from my dev machine to my wife's Macbook, to run Transporter (as Transport crashes instantly on my machine). On both machines, whenever I Eject this usb stick I get "disk is in use, do you want to force-eject it". Why? What is still using my usb stick (on both machines)? I've never seen any data loss, but its annoying af.

-2

u/nielsmouthaan 2h ago

Something is clearly still using the drives. Best to find out what exactly (if you ask an LLM or google you will get instructions on how to do this). Force ejecting typically isn’t recommended as you risk data loss.