Funked up USB behaviour

[Etienneb]

Had my bittorrent server set up mint then I had to move everything, my Guru plug and hardrive, to an out of the way place. Disconnected everything, reconnected everything but the external drive wouldn't show up using df -h. I spent hours last night trying to sort it out to no avail. So after work today I take a stab at it again and notice that my root folder is at 100%. After some digging around I find a torrent my wife downloaded today in /media/usb3. The kicker is that that's the mount point for my drive but the damn thing wasn't plugged in. Did screw up just unplugging my drive while it was "hot". If I was supposed to unmount it before unplugging it what are my options?
Cheers,
Etienneß

[vbu]

Rule of thumb is to setup applications to store files in folders of removable media, NOT in the root folder of the media.  This way if the media is removed or fails to mount, the folder won't be accessible and the application won't be able to write the file.  In your case, since /media/usb3 was available (it's the mount point on the plug) but the drive was NOT mounted, bittorrent happily stored the file directly on the plug.

Ideally you should always issue the umount command before removing media. Via the command line:

Code:

sudo umount /media/usb3

This ensures that all open files are properly closed or it will tell you that the drive is busy and can't be unmounted.

HTH

Ver