Version 1.9.5 of Jettison was released last week, addressing a couple of significant bugs. Jettison wasn’t correctly saving its settings for notification sounds, which resulted in a sound not being played if you selected a new one in the settings and then quit and relaunched Jettison. This update also fixes a problem with some disks not remounting after waking the system from sleep. This only occurred occasionally, and depended on how busy the system was when a disk was ejected – there was a race condition that could result in the disk being ignored if the system was very busy.
So, if you’re running into either of these issues, definitely make sure you grab the update. And even if you’re not, there’s really no reason not to update. The changes in this release are very targeted, and the update is free if you’ve already bought a license for Jettison.
As usual, you’ll find download links and a full change history on the What’s New page. Or if you’re already running Jettison, just choose “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
Version 1.9.4 of Jettison is available, delivering better handling of its notification sounds and fine-tuning a few details for Tahoe. If you’ve purchased a license for Jettison, this update is free.
The most visible change in this release is the new liquid glass icon for macOS 26, which is optimized for Tahoe’s dark and clear icon styles as well as the default appearance.
In addition, Jettison’s notification sounds are now displayed with their localized names, making them consistent with what you see in the Sound settings in System Settings. And when Jettison plays them, they’ll be played at the volume of the system alert sounds rather than the overall system sound volume.
Version 1.9.4 also addresses a few bugs, and will automatically quit the PhotosReliveWidget and com.apple.amp.devicesui processes before sleep if they’re being run by the system. That ensures that those processes won’t keep files open on any external drives and interfere with Jettison ejecting the drives.
Release notes and a download link are available on the What’s New page. Or if you’re already running Jettison, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar.
Version 1.9.3 of Jettison is available, bringing a number of improvements and fixes to our drive management app.
Jettison now understands volume groups, which are the coupled drives that house a macOS system and its associated data. If you manually eject or mount a system drive, Jettison will also eject or mount the data drive that’s associated with that system. You can’t eject the system you’re currently running, but if you’ve got a second copy of macOS installed – like the macOS Tahoe beta that Apple is currently testing – Jettison will handle its data drive for you automatically.
If you’ve got Jettison set up to eject drives when your Mac goes to sleep, it normally waits 5 seconds after the machine wakes up before it tries to remount those ejected drives. That gives external drives time to power up before Jettison goes looking for them, but in some cases that’s not long enough. You can now specify a longer delay in your settings if you’ve got a drive that’s not reliably remounting after sleep:
This update also adds support for NTFS and extFS drives mounted over a network, and fixes a bug that caused SSHFS drives to eject really, really slowly. In addition, the macOS corespotlightd and managedcorespotlightd processes are quit before any external drive is ejected. This gets rid of problems with those processes keeping a drive busy and causing errors when Jettison tried to eject it.
And one more thing… Jettison’s progress window would sometimes get stuck on-screen if you were running a beta of macOS Tahoe. This should be fixed in version 1.9.3 – at least I can no longer reproduce it here. If you run into further problems with Tahoe, let me know.
This update is free for folks who’ve already purchased a license for Jettison – thank you! Just choose “Check for Update” in Jettison’s menu in your menu bar. Or for release notes and download links, visit the What’s New page.
Version 1.9.1 of Jettison has been released, and despite the minor x.x.1 version number change there are some new capabilities that will be significant to certain users.
First, Jettison can now eject disks after the display turns off. This is helpful for people that have system sleep disabled or can’t distinguish between display sleep and full system sleep. By ejecting the disk on display power-down, you can safely unplug external drives anytime the screen is dark.
The flip side of this, of course, is that things like Time Machine backups to an external drive will not run while you’re away because the drive ejects soon after your Mac goes idle. Also, this will NOT fix problems caused by plugging your external drives into a hub that’s integrated into your display. If the hub powers down when the display powers off, macOS will still give you “Disk not ejected properly” errors. Jettison ejects disks after the display powers off – it has no way of detecting display power-down before it happens.
The second big thing in this release is a change to accommodate macOS Sequoia 15.4’s increased security around ejecting disks when your login account doesn’t have administrator privileges. I’m not sure why Apple made this change, but errors saying “Higher privileges required by Jettison” began occurring in 15.4. So Jettison now uses a helper application (which does require an admin password to install) so it can still eject your disks despite this somewhat nonsensical restriction.
Version 1.9.1 also improves error reporting when disks can’t be ejected. It uses additional diagnostics to catch situations where an app is keeping a disk busy and includes more information in the resulting error messages. It also preemptively terminates the system’s AMPDevicesAgent process, which can prevent an external disk from ejecting if it houses your Apple Music library.
A full change history and download links are available on the What’s New page, or if you’re already running Jettison, just select “Check for Update” from its menu in your menu bar. As usual, this update is free if you’ve purchased a license for Jettison.
Version 1.9 of Jettison was released today, delivering some significant internal changes as well as improvements that many users will see when using it.
First off, Jettison now asks you to give it permission for Full Disk Access in your system’s privacy controls. This is necessary because macOS will sometimes refuse to let Jettison mount external USB drives unless it has this special permission. It’s still not clear to me why Apple makes this distinction, since Jettison is able to mount other drives without Full Disk Access, but to avoid problems and confusion, Jettison now requests it by default.
Another change is that Jettison no longer shows every volume that’s mounted on your system. On recent versions of macOS, a number of disk images are automatically mounted by the system. Some, known as cryptexes, are encrypted volumes used for augmenting or updating parts of the system itself, while others such as the iOS Simulator are mounted if you use Apple’s Xcode developer tools. Still other disk images are mounted as part of installing macOS updates. Jettison used to show all of these in its “Eject” menu, which could be confusing because they’re not shown by the Finder, so they no longer appear there.
When Jettison can’t eject a drive because there are open files on it, it pops up an error message to tell you so. These messages have been improved to provide more detail, and when you’re manually ejecting a disk you’ll also see “Quit” buttons to quit any offending apps. That will usually let Jettison finish ejecting the drive.
In the past, using Jettison to mount encrypted volumes that were part of the boot volume’s APFS container would generate odd error messages. This was because the system automatically unlocks those volumes when it unlocks the system volume, but Jettison wasn’t aware of that (Jettison has to unlock all other encrypted APFS volumes before mounting them, so it tried to do that with the unlocked volumes and got an error because they weren’t locked). Jettison is now smarter about handling this case. My apologies if you have this somewhat odd configuration on your system and ran into the bug.
The internal revamp also fixed a number of little bugs, as well as changing the behavior of one feature: If you have volumes selected in the “Don’t remount these disks” menu in Jettison > Settings > Options, those disks will automatically be ejected when Jettison launches. The assumption here is that if you don’t want the drives remounted after they’ve been ejected, you basically don’t want them mounted unless you do so manually.
As usual, this update is free if you’ve already bought a Jettison license (thank you!). You can choose “Check for Update” from Jettison’s menu to get the new version, or download it from the What’s New page. Both ways also give you a complete change history.
Version 1.8.8 of Jettison was released today, adding a new option for mounting disks while also fixing some annoying issues.
When you hold down the Command key, the “Mount” command in Jettison’s menu becomes “Mount and Open.” As you’d expect from the name, selecting a disk will not only mount it so it’s available for use, but will also open a new Finder window showing its contents. This is a handy shortcut if you want to mount an offline disk and immediately get to work with it.
On the bug-fix side of things, this release fixes an issue that could wake up the display while Jettison ejected external disks. This didn’t cause problems with sleep, but could be confusing when manually putting a Mac to sleep. You’d invoke sleep, the screen would go dark and then would immediately wake back up, then it’d go black again and the machine would finish going to sleep. Just weird.
Version 1.8.8 also addresses a problem with disks not mounting properly if they’re encrypted but already unlocked, and improves error messages when failures occur while mounting encrypted disks. It also gives a more helpful error message when you try to manually mount an encrypted drive whose password isn’t in your keychain.
As always, full release notes and the downloadable update are available by choosing “Check for Updates” from Jettison’s menu in your menu bar, or from the Jettison – What’s New page.
Two new releases of Jettison, our little utility for ejecting external disks when your Mac sleeps, have delivered a host of changes. Outwardly, Jettison no longer shows hidden volumes like Update and Macintosh HD – that will reduce confusion. It also lets you quickly open a disk in the Finder by holding down the Command key (the “Eject” menu becomes “Open”). And error messages are more informative.
Under the hood, there are bigger changes which eliminate problems when the system wakes and then goes back to sleep very shortly thereafter, it handles unlocking of encrypted drives much better, and performs numerous other disk-handling operations more smoothly.
A full list of the changes in versions 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 is available on the Jettison release page, or by choosing “Check for Update” if you’re already running Jettison on your Mac.
Version 1.8.5 of Jettison is available. It delivers compatibility with macOS 13 Ventura, while also including a number of other improvements on all supported versions of macOS.
Mounting of disks is quicker, and for those of you using shared volumes from a file server or NAS, it’s more reliable as well. A notification is now also displayed when disks are remounted, so you know it’s no longer safe to unplug them – make sure to use Jettison’s menu in your menu bar to eject them again before disconnecting them! And for the few people that use RAM disks these days, Jettison recognizes that they’re not external disks and will not eject them when your Mac goes to sleep.
There are also tweaks to the user interface to improve your experience, error reporting and handling has been improved, and more information is logged internally for troubleshooting purposes. All in all, the changes should improve many people’s experience with Jettison.
For a full list of changes and download links, visit the Jettison release page. If you’re already running Jettison, just choose “Check for Updates…” from its menu in your menu bar to get the new version.
Version 1.8.2 of Jettison is now available. It brings a number of improvements, including several fixes for problems remounting disks after they’ve been ejected.
Jettison’s error reporting has also been improved so that it catches edge cases where a disk unmounts after Jettison has been told by the system that the unmount failed. This should prevent those error messages that said a problem had occurred, but then didn’t list any disks in the error details.
For several releases now, Jettison has been quietly quitting Photos, iTunes and Music before it ejects disks, then relaunching them when those disks are remounted. This prevents problems for the many people that keep their photos or music on external drives. In doing this, however, Jettison was a little too aggressive: It quit the apps when you chose “Eject External Disks Now” from its menu as well as when the machine went to sleep. That turned out to be a Bad Idea, so now it’s only done before ejecting disks when the machine is actually going to sleep.
In a similar vein, there are now some preference settings accessible via Terminal to tweak this behavior. You can turn off the auto-quit / relaunch behavior using this command in Terminal:
where a whitespace-separated list of process names goes in place of photoanalysisd.
And yes, if these options prove popular, they’ll get their own place in the preferences dialog so you no longer have to use Terminal to set them up.
So anyway, this is available in Jettison 1.8.2, with details and download links on the Jettison Release Page. Or if you’re already using Jettison, choose “Check for Updates” from its menu in your menu bar.
Well, Jettison 1.8 didn’t go quite as planned. It adopted a different system API to get power notifications so that it could better handle “dark wake” events, where macOS wakes up briefly to perform backups and network maintenance while it’s sleeping. While the dark wake stuff all worked as expected, it ended up causing issues with some external drives not getting ejected before sleep because sleep notifications were delivered slightly later in the going-to-sleep sequence. It didn’t make a difference on test machines here or with our beta testers, but impacted some users out in the real world once version 1.8 was released. If you’re one of those folks, I’m sorry for the trouble 🙁
Version 1.8.1 was released today, and takes a hybrid approach, using both the old and new API’s to ensure that it gets sleep notifications as early as possible. This restores the reliability of Jettison’s eject-on-sleep capabilities.
This release also allows you to turn off the feature introduced in version 1.8 that quits Music, iTunes and Photos before sleep (to allow ejection of external media containing music and photo libraries). Apparently iTunes doesn’t correctly return to the same location in audiobooks when Jettison relaunches it after waking up, which can be really annoying. So you can disable the feature by using this command in Terminal:
