how to safely remove a usb stick

[ErikMAkkerman]

In ubuntu 12.04 there was a pop-up-menu-item "safely remove".
In ubuntu 14.04 I only see "eject".
Observing that my usb-stick keeps on blinking for a while, after
having ejected it, I conclude that this is not a "safe" eject.

Where has the "safely remove" command gone?
How can I add it again?

Erik

[sudodus]

when you 'eject' a pendrive, the action 'behind the curtain' is unmounting the partition(s) on the usb drive. It may also switch it off completely. The unmount command will first make a sync command to flush buffered data to the drive (the flash memory), and then unmount it (so that it will not be available for read/write operations. When you see it blinking, it is busy flushing data to the drive. It may take time, because a pendrive is usually much slower compared to hard disk drives and SSDs.

So do not unplug the drive while it is blinking.

If you want to be quite sure, look behind the curtain with terminal window commands.

Run
sudo parted -l and
df to identify the mounted partitions.

Example:

sudo parted -l
...
Model: Kanguru SS3 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 15.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 3664MB 3663MB primary ext4 boot
2 3664MB 3999MB 336MB primary linux-swap(v1)

df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5 53527044 29404572 21403448 58% /
...
/dev/sdc7 880870988 370228920 465896392 45% /media/multimed-2
/dev/sdd1 3520656 1103644 2238172 34% /media/Trusty-B1-nonpae



Flush the buffers with
sync

When everything is flushed the terminal window returns to prompt (in my case sudodus@ssd-grund ~ $)

Now you can unmount the partition quickly (in this example /dev/sdd1 mounted on /media/Trusty-B1-nonpae)


sudo umount /dev/sdd1

and it is ready for unplugging.

If you skip the sync command, unmounting will be slower, because it has to do the flushing before it can finish. Wait until the command finishes and the terminal window returns to prompt.

-o-

If you use the eject button in your file browser, and wait for the process to finish, it is also safe to unplug the pendrive.