Summary: This blog explains in detail as to why you should remove your Mac external drive safely.

But, more importantly, it also shares a few methods to recover the drive and the data stored within, in case you’re facing such a situation due to abrupt drive ejection.

To recover your data from the external storage drive, free download the below tool:

The moment you’re done using your external storage drive on a Mac, it is important to ‘eject’ the drive safely before physically unplugging it from the Mac. Improper ejection might cause issues such as disk corruption, file system corruption, and partition loss, etc. All of these issues would result in data loss, aside from rendering the drive unusable until these issues are sorted out.

External Drive Safe Ejection on macOS

Why Eject Safely on Mac?

Safe drive ejection is a fundamental practice to prevent unwanted
errors and potential data loss. Safe ejection of your external storage drive on Mac
prevents:

• Disk corruption: It occurs when macOS cannot finish writing data to the drive due to any hindrance to the write operations as a result of abrupt ejection, power failure, etc.
• File system corruption: It takes place when the storage drive file system turns corrupt and unreadable due to driver failure, improper shutdown, etc.
• Partition loss: It happens when the storage drive loses its partition due to deletion of partition, virus, abrupt unplugging of the storage drive, etc.
• Data Loss: It occurs when the external storage drive turns corrupt, and all its stored data disappears due to no file system.

How to Eject a Drive Safely on Mac?

To eject your external
storage drive safely on your Mac, perform any one the following:

• Drag-and-drop the external storage drive icon from Desktop to Trash.
• Open Finder from Dock and click the eject icon beside the external storage drive.

• Select the external storage drive and press the Command + E keys

Data Recovery from Corrupt External Storage Drive on Mac

Step 1: Recovering the inaccessible data

When an external storage drive turns corrupt, DO NOT ERASE it immediately to fix the drive corruption issue—unless you’ve recovered the lost data. Erasing the drive will result in permanent data loss. So, the first step should be to recover the underlying data from the drive.