Didier Kryn <[email protected]> wrote:

> There remains a fundamental problem with automatic mount/umount. While 
> automounting is safe, auto-unmounting is not if it is triggered by device 
> removal.

> Unmounting must be done *before* removing the device if anything has been 
> written to it, otherwise data is lost and the filesystem may be corrupted; 
> also running applications with open files in the mountpoint can broken.

Indeed

> auto-unmounting is not if it is triggered by device removal.

But there is a slight issue in that if the user has yanked the drive, there 
isn't much you can do about it. Short of having precognition so you know in 
advance, or modifying all hardware to support locking the drive in, once the 
drive is disconnected then you have no options - other than to tell the user 
off.

Blame Micro$oft :-)
Long after Apple required a user explicitly eject a floppy disk (which got them 
a lot of flak IIRC), Micro$oft still worked on the "pop the disk out when you 
feel like it" process. OS X will tell you off if you yank a drive without 
ejecting (unmounting) it - when you put it back, you'll be told off about it 
not having been ejected properly. Windows still doesn't do that AFAIK - it just 
silently "fixes" it without giving any clue to the user that they did anything 
wrong.

A couple of years ago, I surprised a group I'd given a presentation to by 
"Safely removing" hardware before I yanked my USB stick !
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