> I am not sure about this, i understood that "sync" was performed by > "umount" so that buffers were flushed before the device was actually > unmounted
umount should flush all buffers first, then perform the umount. However, I believe this doesn't happen in the case of fatXX filesystems, so unless you manually sync before umount you end up with a corrupted filesystem on your usb stick (or doze partition). The mount option "sync" causes all writes to the device to be performed synchronously, i.e. there's effectively no buffering used. That's why it's slow, but if you want to be able to unplug the USB stick at any time without explicitly flushing buffers (or unmounting), you will have to mount with option "sync" because if you don't, by the time the kernel knows the device is unplugged, flushing buffers is a thing of the past and you've lost your data. The command for flushing buffers to disk is also called sync, don't confuse the two. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
