"When you connect" greyed out...
 

If I have a USB external drive connected to my 13" MBP, the option for "When you connect <DRIVE NAME> to your Macintosh is greyed out.

Tried with two different external drives. Neither lets me schedule "when connected".

Running Version 96 on 10.11.1

Thanks in advance for any insights...

David

Are you backing up to an image on that drive, or directly to the drive?

Morning Dave - backing up straight to the drive. I can manually invoke the backup, no problem.

I have no idea why the option would be disabled. The only items that are disabled are images and drives that aren't returned as "ejectable" by the OS. I've got a number of USB drives here and I can turn the option on for all of them...?

Interestingly enough, when I plug in either of the two USB drives I have here on my desk, I do not get the little triangle icon in my Finder to allow me to eject. I can right click on the drive and select Eject, and it will eject, but no triangle.

Both drives work fine otherwise...

Hmm....I'm wondering if I may have some corruption somewhere.

Clearly something weird is going on. But that's why "on connect" is disabled - we only enable on connect for a drive the system says is "removable", basically.

Tried reformatting one of the drives and trashing the finder plist file. Earlier, did a re-installed if 10.11.1.

No go.

Ah well. Will do a bit more research.

Thanks Dave :)

It's rather weird that it wouldn't be ejectable. I wish I could offer some specific advice there! Are you an admin on the system?

I am an admin, yep. Thanks for the thought. It's definitely a system-wide issue, and if worse comes to worse, and it truly starts to drive me crazy, I'll just resort to a nuke and pave.

Let's hope that's not necessary. Do you have another Mac that you've checked the drive with?

I do and I did check - all well with the drive. Eject icon/triangle appears in Finder.

OK. So, at least you know it's not the drive doing something wacky.

Yep - exactly. On the problematic Mac, am noticing that external drives are slow to eject, so there is a process somewhere that is corrupted.

Minor problems like these can actually be a bit fun - your machine isn't exactly melting down, and it's an opportunity learn a bit more. (He said, before giving up and re-installing everything...)

:)

A simple OS reinstall (vs. a nuke-and-pave) is likely the first step here.

A bit red faced, but it turns out that if I plug one of the drives directly into one of my MBP's USB ports, everything is fine (including the presence of eject buttons and the availability of the "When you connect" option in SD!).

The problem is only fully replicable if I plug a drive into my D-Link 7-port powered USB hub, and subsequently the hub into my MBP.

I know this set up of launching SD! when one of these same drives was connected via the D-Link had actually worked before, but I cannot be sure when it stopped working. My guess is the install of El Cap but, again, I'm not sure.

Anyway, thought I better post back with the final solution in case anyone encounters this going forward.

Thanks again, Dave.

:o