What's Keeping Me Alternative for macOS Sequoia & Sonoma

If you’ve used Macs for a while, you might remember What’s Keeping Me. It solved one specific problem: when macOS refused to eject a drive because “something” was using it, What’s Keeping Me told you exactly what that something was.

It was simple, focused, and it worked. Then it stopped.

What happened to What’s Keeping Me

The last release was version 2.4, in 2014. The developer, HAMSoft Engineering, stopped maintaining it, and the website disappeared: software directories that still list the app now show no working homepage for it and flag it as discontinued.

It ran well for years, but software rot caught up with it. Three things left it behind:

No support for modern permissions. macOS Mojave introduced Full Disk Access, and Ventura tightened it further. A utility now needs that consent before it can see which files other processes have open. What’s Keeping Me predates the system entirely and never requests the permission, so it cannot see the processes it exists to report.

No Apple Silicon build. It shipped six years before Apple Silicon and never got a native binary.

No one maintaining it. No updates, no fixes, no support, and no site to ask for help.

What’s frustrating is that the underlying problem never went away. macOS still throws the same vague “one or more programs may be using it” error it did in 2010, and Apple still ships no built-in way to find out which program. That gap is why people are still searching for this app a decade later.

The workarounds, and why they fall short

Terminal and lsof. Power users reach for the Unix command that lists open files:

sudo lsof /Volumes/External

This does work. It shows every process holding a file on that volume. But you need to be comfortable in Terminal, parse technical output, and know which processes are safe to kill and which aren’t. That’s a lot of overhead for something as routine as unplugging a drive. (If you want to learn it properly, we have a full guide to lsof for Mac users.)

Activity Monitor. It can show the files a process has open, but the workflow runs backwards. You have to already know which process to inspect. When your actual question is “what is using my drive,” Activity Monitor makes you guess first and verify second. You could inspect every running process one at a time, but almost nobody does.

Disk Utility. It can force unmount a volume, but that’s the same thing as force ejecting from Finder. It never tells you what was blocking the drive; it just overrides the block. That’s fine if the process was only reading. If something was mid-write, you can corrupt data. Without knowing what’s happening, you’re gambling. (Worth reading: when force eject is safe and when it isn’t.)

Ejecta: the same job, maintained

Ejecta was built to fill exactly the gap What’s Keeping Me left. It sits in your menu bar, shows the status of every connected drive, names the processes blocking ejection, and lets you quit them without leaving the menu.

The difference from the Terminal route is that the diagnostic work is done for you. No command syntax, no raw output to interpret. Click the blocked drive, see what’s holding it, click to quit that process, eject.

It also recognizes system processes rather than treating everything as equally safe to kill. Spotlight’s mds and mdworker, fseventsd, and similar services are identified as system-level so you know what you’re looking at. Time Machine gets specific handling: if a backup is actively running on the drive you’re trying to eject, Ejecta detects it and offers to stop the backup first, instead of killing a process mid-write.

How Ejecta compares

The key difference beyond compatibility: Ejecta doesn’t just show you the problem, it lets you fix it in the same click path. See the blocking process, quit it, eject the drive.

How to switch

1. Download Ejecta. Purchase and download from ejecta.app for $9.99, one-time, no subscription.

2. Grant Full Disk Access. On first launch, Ejecta asks for Full Disk Access. This is required to see which processes have files open on your drives — the same information What’s Keeping Me needed, now handled through the modern permission system it never supported. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access and enable Ejecta.

3. Use it. When a drive won’t eject, click the Ejecta icon in your menu bar. You’ll see your drives, which have blockers, and exactly which process is responsible. Quit the process. Eject safely.

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

Buy Ejecta for $9.99 →

Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. One-time purchase, lifetime license, free updates.