April 4, 2008
Automatically eject drives when your Mac is feeling sleepy
Posted Apr. 4, ’08, 9:41 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips
The portability factor of laptops can be both a blessing and a curse. There are certain problems you only run into when you’re on a MacBook. For example, dealing with external drives. As common as those have been in the past few year, the introduction of Time Machine has made them even more popular.
But if you, like me, don’t even bother shutting down your computer most of the time, rather preferring to just put the notebook to sleep, you probably have to contend with remembering to constantly unmount any external drives. Fortunately, a reader over at Mac OS X Hints has rigged up a way for you to automatically unmount drives when you put the machine to sleep and remount them when you wake it. It uses a program called SleepWatcher to accomplish this, in conjunction with a couple of command-line scripts.
Looks like a pretty nifty way to solve what is likely becoming a more and more widespread issue. Anything that helps stave off data loss is good by me.
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This could be plenty useful for desktop users, too. There have been plenty of times that I've plugged in my USB keychain, stepped away for a bit, and come back to pick up my keys. It would be nice to be able to simply yank the thing out of the jack, instead of having to wake up / unlock my desktop and eject first.
This should have been an option originally included in the operating system preferences.
I lost all my mp3's when my external hard drive got unplugged by accident.
Anyone knows of a good disk utility that might help me reverse the damage??? thanx
Mario G
mariog@orangemindz.com
I ditto the post for having this for desktop machines as well. I generally turn off my Time Machine drive when I don't use it and I've often put my iMac to sleep, only to notice that I didn't eject it. So, wake up the iMac, eject, sleep. Would be great to have this automated.