I don't eject my USB sticks properly

Regret is in near future.

@MrNielsen I do. Until Windows say "A program is using this drive bla bla etc..", then I just .. you know.

Neither did I until now when my 1TB external HDD is not recognized anymore...
Do it, guys... It's really useful

@SnuKies Are you sure this is due to not ejecting it?

@Cyanide ... I .... cough cough... ehmmm ... know "a friend" that when windows say "drive in use, unable to safely blablabla" he just shut down the pc, remove the usb stick and restart the pc...

@deadlyRants Had it happen to me a lot of times, cause I have a loose USB port on the drive itself. Good thing I decided to never keep important data on it.

@gfux64 ...and hope there are no new updates when restarting.

YOU MONSTER!

@gfux64 Clever. Signing out would work as well, I think?

and .. oh .. "a friend"?

@deadlyRants yeah, I constantly get the message "You need to format it before you can use it", and even Ubuntu tells me that in order to open it, I need to go on Windows and safely remove it.

Writing data to disk is an expensive operation, so the OS does everything it can to avoid doing it whilst still keeping the luser happy. It will store data in a RAM cache to fake a successful and quick write, and schedules the actual write to the medium to a later more suitable point. If you disconnect the device between the "File transfer complete" dialog and the OS performing the actual write, you can expect data loss. On Linux just run "sync" before disconnecting devices.

USB what? Is that one of those pre-internet things?

Pulling out isn't safe.

I too like to live dangerously

There is a nice tool called EjectUSB.exe on the net. Run it, and it ejects it automatically, closing even the used windows.

@DrJume I got it from the same site as where I got my freecashtoday.exe

@SnuKies 😂 i've ruined drives doing this, please unmount/eject properly

@fdgram My main problem is that windows seems to be constantly doing some sort of read or there's a background process doing SOMETHING that's stopping me from safely ejecting to stick.
Never have the problem on Linux.
HMM.. 🔎

@GeaRSiX because you have a file open, or a folder open in Explorer, etc

@fdgram In at least 10% of all cases there isn't anything running that you'd expect to access the drive, but Windows still says there's "a process" using it. And because I don't want to start killing processes I just pull the plug. Worked fine so far.

@fdgram Nope. Restarting explorer.exe helps though, but doing that everytime you need to eject is silly.
Also I've got an external HDD hooked up and a lot of nights when I've left my machine on sleep I'll hear it start buzzing (like it does when I read from it).
I'm not hating on Windows or anything, this is just a major frustration.

I believe it's only an issue if the USB is being written to at time of eject.