Why Is My External Drive Unexpectedly Mounted?

November 18, 2010 9:20 AM

Recently aded an external drive to my iMac for storage of photo files. It runs off a Firewire 800 port. I also use a Time Capsule. The external drive is mounted overnight via crontab for the daily backup run. When that's done, a script unmounts the drive. This works reliably. The drive, then, should be unmounted the rest of the time. However, the drive is mounted at unexpected and sporadic intervals. The logs reveal that this is usually, but not always, immediately following the unmounting of the Time Capsule after an hourly run. Not on every run, but perhaps on one run per day. In addition, the external drive is sometimes mounted in a way that appears to have no association with the Time Capsule. What's going on?
posted by justcorbly to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I have an external drive connected to my Mini and it cycles up all the time. I checked some forums and people seemed to think it was a bug with Spotlight. I eliminated the Spotlight search function (for the external drive) in the Apple Menu > System Prefs > Privacy and that worked for a while but it's started up again.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:27 AM on November 18, 2010