Disk Not Ejected Properly messages

1) I bought an official Apple USBc to USBc cable to eliminate the adapter in the middle. Problem persisted.

2) I recently upgraded to MAC OS Ventura 13.0.1 which exacerbated the issue initially. At one point I couldn't even stay connected to the drive for more than a few minutes, making video processing in Final Cut and taking backups impossible to action.

3) Having read numerous topics on the internet about this problem I tried using the First aid utility in Disk Utility. This ran through the storage part of my drive but then failed after several hours running through the Time Machine backups.

4) Another option I read about was using Terminal to eject the disk.

Open Terminal from Launchpad

• diskutil list
• diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
• diskutil eject /dev/disk4 Replace (4) with the number of your external hard drive. In my case it was obvious which was the 5TB drive.

I then unplugged the drive, shut down my Mac and plugged the drive back in before starting up again.

I have no idea which of these steps has done the most good but as of 17th Nov 2022, I have now gone for two days without seeing the dreaded messages.

As another precaution, I have also set the drives not to go to sleep. This is just guesswork on my part!

I am also being very particular about closing everything down and ejecting the drive when I shut down my MacBook.

I have been using the 5TB drive now to process videos in Final Cut Pro and to take Time Machine backups successfully so fingers crossed that this situation remains.

I hope this helps someone out there as I know it is extremely frustrating to not be able to process data on external drives.

23rd November 2022

And now I am seeing them again! Doh. Just when I thought I had solved it! Back to the drawing board. At least I had a few days peace and quiet and was able to secure one of my videos that I was nervous about losing.

I have just realised that there was probably a Time Machine backup running and writing to the disk when I had to reboot the Mac to install an update to Ranktracker. Maybe another clue there?

24th November 2022

Yesterday I switched off automatic Time Machine backups and since then I've not had a problem unless I initiate a TM backup manually and then the messages start.

18th December 2022

I have now bought another 2TB hard drive and devoted that solely to Time Machine backups. My other drives I will use for video projects only.

It’s an expensive way to resolve the problem but so far so good after a week.