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Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives

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On Fri, May 01, 2026 at 01:24:09AM +0500, Alexander V. Makartsev wrote:
> On 5/1/26 00:30, coffeeforblood.pardon117@slmail.me wrote:
> > I have some USB-attached HDDs connected to a laptop running Debian 12. Recently I had a problem ejecting them using the file manager and the Disks app, something on the drives was still "in use" even when I had closed every open application.

[...]

> > I'd welcome any other suggestions to make Debian less likely to cause data loss on external drives during shutdown.
> It is a good habit to issue "sync" command, before disconnecting any USB
> storage devices.
> Some storage devices have very slow write speeds, so you have to wait for
> the "sync" command to finish syncing cached writes.
> When it finishes you can run it again, just to be sure it worked and it
> should finish in an instant.
> Now you can safely unmount and then physically disconnect USB storage
> devices.

I think this is the most plausible explanation. Some application "sitting
on" a disk should be long gone when trying to unmount: we are in shutdown,
aren't we?

To get more data, you could just try (while in normal operation) to issue
a "sync" and see how long it takes (for some USB sticks, for me it takes
minutes: as Alexander says, USB is slow). If the shutdown process loses
patience, the scenario you describe could very well happen.

Cheers
-- 
t

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Making shutdowns safer for external drives coffeeforblood.pardon117@slmail.me - 2026-04-30 21:40 +0200
  Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives "Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com> - 2026-04-30 22:30 +0200
    Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives debian-user@howorth.org.uk - 2026-04-30 22:40 +0200
      Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives "Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com> - 2026-04-30 23:40 +0200
        Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> - 2026-05-01 00:00 +0200
          Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives Jan Claeys <lists@janc.be> - 2026-05-02 15:30 +0200
        Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2026-05-01 15:10 +0200
    Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-01 08:30 +0200
  Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-01 04:50 +0200
    Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives ghe2001 <ghe2001@protonmail.com> - 2026-05-01 05:40 +0200
      Re: Making shutdowns safer for external drives Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> - 2026-05-01 07:20 +0200

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