Re: [OT?] home partition vs. home directory

[Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com>]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 Cindy-Sue Causey wrote:
> Cliff's Notes Version Part I: Flaky USB connections are an important
> factor! An accidentally disconnected USB connection can cause data to
> become *unknowingly* redirected back to the original directory on the
> primary partition. That situation can then potentially lead to loss of
> e.g. downloaded data if a user is not always 100% aware of where data
> is actually residing at all times.....

Hi,

I've had problems with flakey connections with external USB
drives for years. These problems have occurred with various
drives and on two different laptops. The usual result is a
disk operation such as 'ls' fails with the message
"input/output error". This usually happens after
the drive has been idle for some hours. 

In my experience, the only case where writes went into
directory of the mount point (and not the intended
partition) was when the partition was not mounted. Once an
I/O error occurs, at least in my system, no further read or
write operations to the mount point will succeed. 

with regards

-- 
Joel Roth