Time Machine Won't Let You Eject Your Backup Drive: Here's Why

You finished your backup. Time Machine shows it’s done. You click eject, and macOS tells you the disk is in use. Sound familiar?

This happens constantly with Time Machine drives, and it’s one of the most frustrating parts of Apple’s otherwise excellent backup system. The backup completes, but something keeps holding onto the drive. You’re stuck choosing between yanking the cable (don’t) and waiting indefinitely for some mysterious process to finish.

The culprit is almost always one of two things: the backupd daemon hasn’t fully released the drive yet, or Spotlight is busy indexing your backup. Sometimes it’s both.

Why backupd holds onto your drive

Time Machine backups are handled by a background process called backupd. When you see that backup progress bar complete, the visible part of the backup is done, but backupd often continues working in the background. It might be updating metadata, verifying the backup integrity, or cleaning up temporary files.

On Apple Silicon Macs, backupd runs on the efficiency cores to minimize impact on your work. This is great for performance but means cleanup tasks can take longer than you’d expect. The process is designed to be unobtrusive, which sometimes means it’s slow.

You can check if backupd is still active by opening Activity Monitor and searching for “backup” in the search field. If you see backupd or backupd-helper listed, Time Machine hasn’t fully released your drive yet.

Spotlight makes it worse

Here’s the part that catches most people off guard: macOS indexes Time Machine backups with Spotlight. This lets you search through your backup history directly from Spotlight, which is genuinely useful when you need to find an old version of a file.

The problem is that Spotlight indexing can continue long after your backup finishes. The mds and mds_stores processes (Spotlight’s Metadata Server) will chew through your backup drive for minutes, sometimes hours on a large backup.

You’ll see these processes in Activity Monitor accessing your Time Machine volume. They’re doing legitimate work, but they’re also preventing you from ejecting your drive.

The safe way to check what’s blocking ejection

Before forcing anything, you should confirm what’s actually accessing your drive. Open Terminal and run:

lsof /Volumes/YourDriveName

Replace “YourDriveName” with your actual drive name. If it has spaces, wrap the whole path in quotes:

lsof "/Volumes/Time Machine Backup"

This command lists every process with open files on that volume. You’ll likely see mds, mds_stores, backupd, or Finder in the results. Now you know exactly what to address.

Stopping Spotlight indexing temporarily

If Spotlight is the problem, you can temporarily disable indexing for your backup drive:

sudo mdutil -i off "/Volumes/YourDriveName"

This stops Spotlight from indexing that specific volume. After the command completes, try ejecting again. It should work.

When you reconnect the drive for your next backup, you can re-enable indexing:

sudo mdutil -i on "/Volumes/YourDriveName"

Or just leave it off if you never search your Time Machine backups through Spotlight anyway. Many users find they don’t need this feature and prefer faster ejection times.

Stopping a backup in progress

If backupd is still running, the cleanest solution is to stop Time Machine through the menu bar. Click the Time Machine icon and select “Skip This Backup” or “Stop Backup” (the wording varies by macOS version). This tells the system to gracefully wrap up what it’s doing.

Wait a minute or two after stopping, then try ejecting again. The drive should release.

If there’s no Time Machine icon in your menu bar, you can also stop the backup from System Settings (or System Preferences on older macOS versions). Go to Time Machine settings and toggle it off temporarily.

When nothing else works

Sometimes a process just won’t let go. Before you resort to force-ejecting (which risks data corruption), try this sequence:

First, log out of your user account and log back in. This terminates most user-level processes that might be holding files open.

If that doesn’t work, you can force-quit specific processes from Activity Monitor. Select the process, click the X button in the toolbar, and choose Force Quit. Be careful with system processes, as quitting them can cause instability.

As a last resort, a full restart will definitely release the drive. Shut down your Mac, wait for it to fully power off, then disconnect the drive. This is always safe because macOS flushes all pending writes during shutdown.

Never just pull the cable while your Mac is running. Time Machine drives use APFS (with copy-on-write protection) or HFS+ (with journaling), which help protect against corruption, but a surprise disconnect during an active write operation can still damage your backup catalog or leave your backup in an inconsistent state.

A faster approach

If you’re tired of hunting through Terminal commands and Activity Monitor every time you want to unplug your backup drive, Ejecta handles all of this automatically. It sits in your menu bar, shows you exactly which processes are blocking ejection, and lets you quit them with one click.

For Time Machine drives specifically, Ejecta identifies whether it’s backupd, Spotlight indexing, or something else, and gives you targeted options to release the drive safely. No Terminal commands to remember, no guesswork about which process to quit.

Preventing future ejection problems

A few habits can reduce how often you run into this.

Give your backup a few minutes after it completes before trying to eject. The progress bar finishing doesn’t mean all background work is done. If you don’t need to search Time Machine backups through Spotlight, add your backup drive to the Spotlight privacy list in System Settings. This prevents indexing entirely and makes ejection much faster. You might also consider scheduling backups for times when you won’t need to immediately disconnect the drive, like overnight or during lunch.

Time Machine is worth the occasional ejection hassle. Having reliable backups is too important to skip just because the eject process is sometimes annoying. But you shouldn’t have to guess what’s blocking your drive or worry about corruption from improper disconnection. The right tools make the whole process painless.