What's Keeping Me Alternative for macOS Sequoia

If you’ve been using Macs for a while, you might remember an app called What’s Keeping Me. It solved one specific problem: when macOS refused to eject a drive or let you empty the trash because “something” was using it, What’s Keeping Me told you exactly what that something was.

The app was simple and did its job well. Then it stopped working.

What happened to What’s Keeping Me

What’s Keeping Me was last updated in August 2014. The developer, HAMSoft Engineering, stopped maintaining it, and the developer’s website eventually disappeared entirely. By the time macOS started requiring modern app architectures and security features, What’s Keeping Me was long abandoned.

The app worked for over a decade, but software rot eventually caught up. Without updates to support new macOS versions, security requirements, and Apple Silicon, it became unreliable and eventually unusable for most users.

This left a gap that’s surprisingly hard to fill. macOS still has the same ejection problem it had in 2010. You still get vague error messages about programs using your drive without any indication of which programs. Apple never built this diagnostic capability into the system.

The Terminal workaround

Power users filled the gap with lsof, a Unix command that lists open files. If your drive is named “External,” you’d run:

sudo lsof /Volumes/External

This shows every process with files open on that volume. You can then identify the culprit and either quit the application normally or use kill to terminate the process.

It works, but it’s not exactly user-friendly. You need to understand Terminal, parse technical output, and know the difference between processes you can safely kill and ones you shouldn’t touch. For something as routine as unplugging a drive, that’s a lot to ask.

Activity Monitor: close but not quite

Activity Monitor can show you what files a process has open, but the workflow is backwards. You have to already know which process to inspect. If you’re trying to answer “what’s using my drive,” Activity Monitor makes you guess first and verify second.

You could inspect every running process one by one until you find the one accessing your drive, but that’s tedious enough that most people just give up and force eject (or restart their Mac).

Disk Utility doesn’t help either

Some people try Disk Utility when regular ejection fails. Disk Utility can force unmount volumes, but it’s doing essentially the same thing as force ejecting from Finder. It doesn’t tell you what was blocking the drive. It just overrides the block and hopes for the best.

Force ejecting is sometimes fine, especially if the blocking process was only reading files. But if something was actively writing to the drive, force ejecting can corrupt data. Without knowing what’s actually happening, you’re gambling.

A modern replacement

Ejecta was built to fill the gap What’s Keeping Me left behind. It sits in your menu bar, shows the status of all connected drives, identifies which processes are blocking ejection, and lets you quit them directly.

The key difference from the Terminal approach is that Ejecta handles the diagnostic work automatically. You don’t need to remember command syntax or interpret raw output. Click on a blocked drive, see what’s blocking it, click to quit that process. That’s it.

Ejecta also knows which processes are safe to quit and which ones are system-level processes that need more careful handling. When Spotlight is indexing your drive, for example, Ejecta can disable indexing for that volume rather than just killing the mds process and leaving it in a weird state.

Feature comparison

What’s Keeping Me (when it worked) showed you the blocking processes and let you quit them. That’s exactly what Ejecta does, plus a few things What’s Keeping Me couldn’t do:

Native Apple Silicon support means it runs efficiently on M1, M2, M3, and M4 Macs. What’s Keeping Me never got this update.

Menu bar integration gives you drive status at a glance without opening a separate application. You see which drives are safe to eject before you even try.

System process awareness means Ejecta handles Spotlight, Time Machine, and other macOS services intelligently rather than just offering a kill switch.

The ejection problem isn’t going away

It’s been over a decade since What’s Keeping Me was actively developed, and the core problem is still exactly the same. macOS still gives you useless error messages when you try to eject a drive. Apple still hasn’t built any diagnostic tools into the system. Third-party solutions are still the only way to get a straight answer about what’s using your drive.

If you’re still reflexively reaching for Terminal every time you can’t eject a drive, or just force ejecting and hoping nothing breaks, there’s a better option now. The specific app from 2010 is gone, but the functionality doesn’t have to be.