Using Time Machine

[zarthrusz]

Hello,

I have a Mac Book Pro, and have bought a backup drive (Samsung M3 1TB, made by Seagate). After backing up my machine, I looked for the option to unmount and disconnect the drive. There was no disconnect option to be seen, so I just unplugged my drive, but was told that the drive had been uncleanly unmounted, and may have file system damage. I presume that I'll have to re-partition/format the drive, but where can I find the button to unmount it? Or do I have to go to the command line and use umount? I am using Mac OSX 10.8.2.
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Be. Love. Ed.

 

[DeltaMac]

There's several different methods that you can use to unmount (or eject) an external hard drive.

These steps are the same that you can use to eject any external storage/hard drives/flash drives/optical disks, etc.

1. Drag the desktop icon for the hard drive to the trash. Don't worry, nothing gets erased, it's just one method to eject a drive.
2. Right-click the drive's icon, and choose "Eject (drive name)" from the menu that appears.
3. Select the drive icon by clicking it, and choose Eject, from the Edit menu.
4. If the drive is selected, you can use the keyboard shortcut "Command-E"
5. The drive icon will appear in the sidebar of any finder window, and you can either click the "eject" icon, which looks like a small triangle with a horizontal line underneath. You can also right-click on that drive icon in the sidebar, and choose Eject from the contextual menu.
Probably a few other methods, depending on your own workflow.
But, with all methods, when the drive's icon disappears, it is safe to unplug the drive from your Mac. You will not ever see a message "safe to remove device" like you would with Windows, for example. If the icon disappears from a finder window sidebar, then the device can be unplugged....

Or, just leave the drive mounted, as Time Machine continues to access your external hard drive for back ups every minute, or at least once per hour. Unmount or eject when you want to go portable with your MBPro. I would recommend that you normally leave the Time Machine backup connected, allowing Time Machine to do its work.