Files that appear to be written to usb disk are not in fact written

[Thomas M. Hinkle]

I plug in my mp3 player (which looks like a USB Drive). Nautilus shows a picture of an ipod (very nice) and I move files, copy files, etc.

I unmount the device and the icon goes away.

I unplug the device, and the files I copied are not there.

Further investigation reveals that doing everything from the commandline results in similar behavior, except that now I see the problem -- there is a *long* hang on executing umount. If I wait this out, it seems things work as expected.

So, I believe the problem is that the copying of files does not actually happen until unmounting. When I unmount via nautilus, the icon disappears very fast, leading me to believe it is safe to unplug my device, when in fact my changes have not been written.

From a UI perspective, I'd add the note that I assumed that the copying happened when nautilus told me it was copying the files, so that if I'd seen a long delay on "Eject/Unmount", I likely would have assumed an error in nautilus and pulled the disk out prematurely. Perhaps some feedback is needed to say "Finalizing changes on disk" or "Writing changes to disk" or somesuch -- or if the changes could be forced to happen as we copy, that would be nicer, as the progress-bar-progress would reflect the time it takes to actually write changes to disk.

If memory serves, this is what happened with breezy/hoary -- copying was quite slow (as reflects the reality of this device), whereas at present, copying moves quickly and umount is very slow.

I'm working from a dapper-flight-2 install, with all packages updated as of today (1/7/06) -- let me know if you want more specifics.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. It's known for Ubuntu and upstream already:
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13169
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313639

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Duplicate of #32643, closing

[Timmie (timmie)]

Why can't USB drives be set up that they write the data immediately and not only on umount?

I heard that MAc OS X doesn that. Then you can pull off the drive at any time....

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

See bug #32643 for full information.