The Best What’s Keeping Me Alternative for Modern macOS

What’s Keeping Me was the go-to Mac utility for diagnosing stuck external drives for years. When your drive wouldn’t eject, you’d open What’s Keeping Me, see which process was holding it, and deal with it from there. Simple, effective, genuinely useful.

But it hasn’t been updated for modern macOS. If you’ve upgraded to Sonoma or Sequoia — which most Mac users have by now — What’s Keeping Me doesn’t work reliably. If you’ve landed here looking for a replacement, Ejecta was built to fill exactly that gap.

What What’s Keeping Me Did

What’s Keeping Me was a menu bar utility that answered one specific question: which process is preventing this drive from ejecting? When macOS gives you its unhelpful “one or more programs may be using it” error and refuses to be more specific, What’s Keeping Me would name the exact process — Spotlight, QuickLook, a video editor, a sync client, whatever it was.

It was a focused tool for a focused problem. That focus is what made it useful. And it’s exactly what Ejecta does today.

Why What’s Keeping Me No Longer Works

Not updated for macOS Sonoma or Sequoia. The last version of What’s Keeping Me was compiled years ago. macOS has changed substantially since then, and the app hasn’t kept pace.

Incompatible with modern sandboxing and permissions. macOS Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia introduced stricter Full Disk Access requirements for utilities that inspect what other processes are doing. What’s Keeping Me predates these requirements and doesn’t request the necessary permissions, so it can’t see the processes it needs to report.

No active development or support. The developer has moved on. There are no updates, no bug fixes, no support for issues you might encounter. What worked on Catalina or Big Sur isn’t guaranteed to work today, and there’s no one addressing it.

How Ejecta Compares

Feature	What’s Keeping Me	Ejecta
Works on macOS Sequoia	❌	✅
Works on macOS Sonoma	❌	✅
Menu bar integration	✅	✅
Shows blocking process	✅	✅
Quit process in-app	❌	✅
Force quit fallback	❌	✅
Active development	❌ Abandoned	✅
Price	Paid (unavailable)	$7.99 one-time

The key difference beyond compatibility: Ejecta doesn’t just show you the problem — it lets you fix it without leaving the menu bar. See the blocking process, click to quit it, eject the drive. Done.

How to Switch from What’s Keeping Me to Ejecta

Step 1: Download Ejecta. Purchase and download Ejecta from ejecta.app for $7.99 (one-time, no subscription).

Step 2: Grant Full Disk Access. When you first launch Ejecta, it will ask for Full Disk Access permission. This is required to see which processes have files open on your drives — the same information What’s Keeping Me needed, but now properly handled through macOS’s modern permission system. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and enable Ejecta.

Step 3: Use it. When your drive won’t eject, click the Ejecta icon in your menu bar. You’ll see your connected drives, which ones have blockers, and exactly which process is responsible. Click the process to quit it. The drive turns green. Eject safely.

That’s it. The workflow What’s Keeping Me taught you still works — it’s just faster now, and it actually runs on your Mac.

Buy Ejecta — $7.99 →

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. One-time purchase, lifetime license, free updates.