[Fwd: Re: What are the dangers of leaving my external USB drive mounted?]

[jonathan at jonmasters.org (Jon Masters)]

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- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: What are the dangers of leaving my external USB drive mounted?
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:13:00 +0000
From: Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org>
Organization: World Organi[sz]ation Of Broken Dreams
To: David Kramer <david at thekramers.net>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0501311710040.25340 at uni.thekramers.net>

David Kramer wrote:

| I am contemplating either leaving the drive on and just mounting it
when I
| need it, or leaving it mounted.  Both computer and drive are on a UPS.
| What would the added danger be if I leave the drive mounted?  I'ts ext2,
| IIRC.

You run the risk of minor filesystem corruption if the power fails at
the wrong moment and the UPS either doesn't kick in or is flat. Since a
modern Linux system runs kernel flushing daemon that writes changed on
disk pages out every 10 seconds, actual data loss shouldn't be too bad.

I might also mention that it is trivial to add a journal to an ext2
filesystem and remount it as ext3, even just on occasion - please see
tune2fs(8) for further information. Check that your machine is
configured to actually shutdown on POWERFAIL.

| PS- I am contemplating leaving it mounted because mounting it in a script
| is a little hard.  This is SuSE 9.0, so I'm not guaranteed it will always
| come out as the same device name.

Hmmm. That's using udev - I'll have a think.

Jon.
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