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.
--
With kindest regards, Alexander.
Debian - The universal operating system
https://www.debian.org
