Didier Kryn <kryn@???> 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 !