I have a USB drive that I use with my Mac for a Time Machine backup and I will sometimes unplug it without ejecting it. Whenever I do, Time Machine isn't using it and, as far as I know, nothing else is either. (Spotlight isn't indexing either when I unplug it.) Is it a bad idea to do this? Will this do any damage to the drive, even though nothing is using it?
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Potentially yes. To prevent storage from wearing itself out from all of the minuscule writes a system may request from a disk, those writes are usually buffered and then flushed all in one go. When you manually eject a disk, you flush the write buffer, and in doing so, ensure that all of the data that's supposed to be on the disk actually is. If you unplug a disk without "ejecting," i.e. flushing the write buffer, you open yourself up to the possibility of filesystem corruption or lost data. |
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