External drive not ejected at the end of the backup?

Langmeier Backup offers the option "Eject media at the end of backup" under "Options -> Global settings -> Program behavior".

This option is used to eject backup media such as USB, external hard disks, tapes, etc. at the end of a backup.

There is one case, however, when an external drive cannot be ejected at the end of the backup. This is the case when an external hard disk pretends to be an internal hard disk.

Both media marked in yellow are external media, the upper one is displayed as an internal medium and the lower one as an external medium. The one at the bottom can be ejected at the end of the backup, but the one at the top cannot, as this hard disk is incorrectly displayed as an internal hard disk.

There is not much that can be done about this, as it is up to the hardware manufacturer to set the correct properties here. However, a web entry that you can find here refers to the "Bootit" tool from Lexar. You can download this tool here.

With this tool you can select the external hard disk and use the "Flip Removable Bit" button. This should cause Windows to recognize the external hard drive as an internal one.

After unplugging and plugging in the external hard disk, the status may then change, but this tool also says that this only works with some media. However, it might be worth a try.

Format the external hard disk to "exFAT".

Formatting the external hard disk to the "exFAT" format may also help, but in addition to advantages over NTFS and FAT32, this could also have disadvantages.

The advantage over NTFS is that you can skip or forget all the security lines that can make life difficult under NTFS and you don't have to do without file sizes above the 4 gigabyte limit.

The disadvantage of exFAT compared to NTFS is that you cannot install Windows 7/Vista or Server 2008 on it and that, if several operating systems are installed on the same computer, the old Server 2000, for example, cannot access the data. For operating systems other than Windows, support is currently not available or very limited.

exFAT also supports the ACL (Access Control List), an access control list with which only certain users can access the files. Furthermore, various transactions are also supported that are not possible with FAT32.

While the maximum file size is limited to 4 gigabytes with FAT32, very large files with a maximum size of 512 terabytes can also be used on the exFAT system.