[Techtalk] finding bad files

[John Sturdy]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 11:05 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org> wrote:

> There is also the human-unfriendly problem of unmounting a drive before
> disconnecting it. Everybody knows this must be done, but everybody has lost
> data because of it. I have, on odd occasions, usually when over-tired, made
> the mistake of pulling out the wrong USB connector or switching off the
> wrong external drive.
>
> <rant>I'm certain the design of peripherals could have been made to take
> account of the flawed nature of humans so that data was buffered in drive
> electronics, and capacitors supplied just enough power to ensure pointers
> were updated correctly. But USB, while having terrific advantages over
> previous kinds of data connectors, was nevertheless a good example of an
> over-complex, yet flawed, spec designed by committee. The main USB document
> is more than 600 pages long!</rant>

Horrible as USB is, I don't think it can take the entire blame here;
the problem may be that the OS hasn't yet written back all the data to
the drive at the stage the human pulls the drive out.  I guess it
could be fixed at the OS software level, but at the cost of efficiency
(more frequent drive accesses).

__John