Version 1.9 of Jettison was released today, delivering some significant internal changes as well as improvements that many users will see when using it.

First off, Jettison now asks you to give it permission for Full Disk Access in your system’s privacy controls. This is necessary because macOS will sometimes refuse to let Jettison mount external USB drives unless it has this special permission. It’s still not clear to me why Apple makes this distinction, since Jettison is able to mount other drives without Full Disk Access, but to avoid problems and confusion, Jettison now requests it by default.

Another change is that Jettison no longer shows every volume that’s mounted on your system. On recent versions of macOS, a number of disk images are automatically mounted by the system. Some, known as cryptexes, are encrypted volumes used for augmenting or updating parts of the system itself, while others such as the iOS Simulator are mounted if you use Apple’s Xcode developer tools. Still other disk images are mounted as part of installing macOS updates. Jettison used to show all of these in its “Eject” menu, which could be confusing because they’re not shown by the Finder, so they no longer appear there.

When Jettison can’t eject a drive because there are open files on it, it pops up an error message to tell you so. These messages have been improved to provide more detail, and when you’re manually ejecting a disk you’ll also see “Quit” buttons to quit any offending apps. That will usually let Jettison finish ejecting the drive.

In the past, using Jettison to mount encrypted volumes that were part of the boot volume’s APFS container would generate odd error messages. This was because the system automatically unlocks those volumes when it unlocks the system volume, but Jettison wasn’t aware of that (Jettison has to unlock all other encrypted APFS volumes before mounting them, so it tried to do that with the unlocked volumes and got an error because they weren’t locked). Jettison is now smarter about handling this case. My apologies if you have this somewhat odd configuration on your system and ran into the bug.

The internal revamp also fixed a number of little bugs, as well as changing the behavior of one feature: If you have volumes selected in the “Don’t remount these disks” menu in Jettison > Settings > Options, those disks will automatically be ejected when Jettison launches. The assumption here is that if you don’t want the drives remounted after they’ve been ejected, you basically don’t want them mounted unless you do so manually.

As usual, this update is free if you’ve already bought a Jettison license (thank you!). You can choose “Check for Update” from Jettison’s menu to get the new version, or download it from the What’s New page. Both ways also give you a complete change history.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2025 at 5:37 am and is filed under APFS, Jettison. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.