LeCoqRoti
Menu bar count: updates without delay
Version 1.9.7 tidies up several loose ends. The menu bar drive count now updates the moment a disk is ejected or mounted, rather than after a short delay. A stuck state where drives would eject and remount in rapid succession has been corrected. The app also stopped quitting mds_stores before sleep — a small behavioural shift that avoids needlessly restarting Spotlight indexing — and a Quit button now appears reliably when a blocking application is identified.
An experienced user's workflow
- Set the preference to eject all external disks when the lid closes, but keep the menu bar item visible for manual overrides.
- Before leaving the desk, open the menu bar drop-down. If a particular Time Machine volume needs to stay mounted, unmount only the working drives individually.
- On waking the Mac, watch the menu bar icon. Jettison checks for each previously connected disk and remounts those it finds, restoring the desktop exactly as it was.
- If a drive is absent after wake, the icon reflects the change immediately. Reconnect it and mount it from the same menu without opening Disk Utility.
Keeping the menu bar controls close feels like having a patch bay for storage: all external volumes listed, each one ejectable or mountable with a single click. The app does the predictable thing on sleep and wake, but it is the manual control that makes it a tool worth keeping in the menu bar.
Time Machine backup: resumes cleanly on wake
Most questions I hear about arrive in the same order. The first is whether the app plays nicely with Time Machine. It does: Jettison identifies Time Machine volumes and unmounts them cleanly, then remounts them after wake so the backup schedule is not disrupted. A second common concern is what happens when you forget to eject a drive manually before unplugging it. The app cannot prevent that — it operates on sleep and wake cycles, not on cable disconnection — but the menu bar icon shows the current state of every volume, so you will at least know what is still mounted. People also ask whether the app adds noticeable delay when closing the lid. On a modern Mac with one or two external disks, the eject sequence completes in under two seconds; the delay is barely perceptible.
Settings to adjust straight away
The default behaviour is to eject everything, which is sensible for most users. Still, there are two preferences I would change immediately. First, in the Disks tab, add any drive you carry between machines to the exempt list: a portable SSD that follows you from desk to desk does not need to be ejected every time the MacBook sleeps for five minutes. Second, enable the option to show a notification when drives are remounted. It is a small confirmation that keeps you from wondering whether a volume came back, especially helpful when the desktop is cluttered with windows and a missing disk icon is easy to miss.
Blocked eject: finding the app holding files open
The most frequent stumbling block is an app holding a file open on an external disk. When this happens, Jettison cannot eject the volume and displays a message naming the blocking application. If you see this, save your work in that app and click the Quit button — the one that version 1.9.7 now shows reliably — then let Jettison finish. Another occasional snag: a drive that remounts but appears with a different name or does not show up in the same Finder location. This is usually a macOS indexing quirk. Eject the volume manually from Jettison's menu, wait a few seconds, and mount it again from the same drop-down; the Finder usually sorts itself out on the second attempt. For users who searched for jettison for mac free download or mac jettison and are now trying the app for the first time, the simplest test is to put a single USB stick through a sleep-wake cycle and watch the menu bar icon — it is the quickest way to confirm that everything is configured correctly before trusting the app with a full desk of drives.
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