On Fri 30 Nov 2018 at 11:23:57 (-1000), Joel Roth wrote: > On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 Cindy-Sue Causey wrote: > > Cliff's Notes Version Part I: Flaky USB connections are an important > > factor! An accidentally disconnected USB connection can cause data to > > become *unknowingly* redirected back to the original directory on the > > primary partition. That situation can then potentially lead to loss of > > e.g. downloaded data if a user is not always 100% aware of where data > > is actually residing at all times..... > > I've had problems with flakey connections with external USB > drives for years. These problems have occurred with various > drives and on two different laptops. The usual result is a > disk operation such as 'ls' fails with the message > "input/output error". This usually happens after > the drive has been idle for some hours.
Hm, with poor connections, I find that it's usually the laptop moving about which disturbs the cable and causes the problem. After idle periods, I just get the message, when it wakes up: usb 4-5: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci which I assume may be because the USB was in some sort of powersaving mode. > In my experience, the only case where writes went into > directory of the mount point (and not the intended > partition) was when the partition was not mounted. Once an > I/O error occurs, at least in my system, no further read or > write operations to the mount point will succeed. I've never had the mount points overwritten, perhaps because of how I set their permissions: drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Apr 11 2018 cdrom0/ and I # touch -r cdrom0 all the mount points ... so it's easy to see when they're in use as the differing permission/ownership/timestamp sticks out. It also sounds as if you have ,errors=remount-ro, set as an option in your /etc/fstab entries so that any error immediately write-protects the partition; though I didn't know that prevents reading as well. Does it? Cheers, David.
