"Alexander V. Makartsev" <[email protected]> wrote: > On 5/1/26 00:30, [email protected] 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. > > > > Since then I've learned of the existence of 'lsof', but at the time > > my experience of Windows and macOS suggested that, under these > > kinds of circumstances, performing a shutdown will clear the holds > > on the drives and cleanly eject them during the process. So as I > > didn't know what else to do I shut down Debian using the menu. > > > > The last thing I saw before the laptop powered off was a series of > > messages reporting that both external drives had failed to unmount > > cleanly, and this was confirmed by the nasty clunking noise from > > the drives indicating sudden parking of the drive heads when the > > USB power was unexpectedly removed. Following this incident I've > > had to recover some several GBs of files from each drive. > > > > Obviously this wasn't a very pleasant experience, so I'd like to > > know what steps I can take to make Debian act more responsibly in > > future. > > > > IM(H)O part of the problem was that the first thing to get torn > > down during the shutdown was the GUI, which meant that there was no > > way for a user to intervene if there was a problem with ejecting > > the drives cleanly. Windows and macOS will prompt the user using > > the GUI if there's a problem that means a drive can't be > > automatically ejected cleanly during a shutdown, giving users an > > opportunity to abort. Can I modify the Debian shutdown sequence to > > keep the GUI available until all drives are safely ejected? > > > > 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.
Why doesn't the OS run synce twice on every storage device when it's shutting down?
