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Eject the external drive

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I've just completed a backup.  When I tried to eject the external drive (a My Book), the machine replied that it could not eject the external drive because there was another program using it.  I'm unaware of any program using it.  How do I safely close Acronis and eject the drive?

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You can simply close the Acronis app when you have finished ueing it.  If you wish to disconnect the drive from the machine use the Up Arrow in lower righthand corner of the task bar and look for the removeable device icon.  Click that and your drive should be desplayed which you can choose to eject and then remove the drive safely.

Enchantech's method should work.  Although, at times, I've found that the drive may still report "in use" if you've mounted the backup image with Windows Explorer at all.  For some reason, Windows Explorer may still keep it in memory after that.  When that happens, in some instances, I can use taskmanager to kill explorer.exe, restart explorer.exe and then safely eject the disk.  If that doesn't work, I just log off and log back on if it's not too inconvenient and then it let'sme eject the disk properly.  Worse case, power down (if you can) and eject then, or just pull the disk if you're sure that Windows and/or Acronis is no longer using it and you don't have time to log off or power down if it won't free it up.

same problem, the solutions above didn't work for me. there are plenty of acronis services in the task manager which i cannot shut down completely. i think they are holding the drive in use. appears not sometimes but every time!

Walter, have you checked what the Removal policy for your external drive is set as?

Open Device Manager and select your external drive from the Disk drives section, then open the Properties for the drive and open the Policies tab.

Using the 'Better performance' option should allow the drive to be safely removed.

You can eject the external drive safely by look for the Safely Remove Hardware icon on the taskbar. In case you don't see it, choose the option that says Show hidden icons and click and hold (or right-click) the icon before choosing the hardware you need to remove. In case you are not able to search the Safely Remove Hardware icon, tap and hold the taskbar and pick the option of Taskbar settings. Here choose the option Select that appears on the taskbar and go down to Windows Explorer: Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media and turn it on. In case it doesn't work you can make sure that the device has stopped all activity like copying or syncing files. Choose Start > Settings > Devices. Pick the device, and tap Remove device. You are done with ejecting the external drive. Go to https://appuals.com/fix-cant-eject-external-hard-drive-on-windows-10/ to find more methods.