GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 722178
unmount notification doesn't work
Last modified: 2015-04-02 07:59:04 UTC
In previous GNOME versions, there used to be an unmount notification when you tried to disconnect an external drive and all data were not synced yet. But it seems to be broken at the moment. Nautilus now does a better job at indicating when the data is synced by keeping the copy progress bar visible until the sync happens. However, as described in bug 722173, this is often broken. As a result, you can often see a situation when you click on the unmount triangle icon besides the external drive name, and "nothing happens" (just the triangle disappears). That is easily interpreted as "you can unplug the drive now". That's not the case (the drive disappears when the sync is done), but new users (and users not used to watch for such subtleties) don't know that. So that just pull out the drive and lose some data without knowing it. Please fix the notification (display "don't unplug yet" gnome-shell popup between unmount attempt and real unmount by kernel), or display that some other way. A good way would be to show a spinner instead of the unmount triangle icon. In that case it's _obvious_ that you should wait and don't unplug yet. Protect the user data, please. Otherwise you see web forums filled with users saying that Fedora/GNOME corrupted their data when using flash drives. This problem is very real. Thanks. nautilus-3.11.3-1.fc21 udisks2-2.1.1-1.fc21 kernel-3.13.0-0.rc8.git0.1.fc21
Here's an example with ext4 drive where the copy dialog disappears immediately and no notification is shown upon unmount request: http://kparal.fedorapeople.org/bugs/gnome_722178.webm And here's the same example what happens if the user doesn't understand that "nothing happening" means "don't unplug yet": http://kparal.fedorapeople.org/bugs/gnome_722178_early.webm Here's a link for a past bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=885133 This feature seems to be broken quite often.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 740896 ***
Thanks, Cosimo.
Lukas Brabec tested this extensively with GNOME 3.16 and it seems to work reliably. Good job.