Questions[unmount](ubuntu)

I don't understand the --object-path option in the udisksctl command

I want to unmount an USB thumb drive, but I don't want to have to lookup it's device name (for example /dev/sdb) at each mount. The device name can change across mounts. I want a static way to identify the drive, for example by its partition name or UUID. Does the --object-path service this function?

How do I identify what the --object-path is of a USB thumb drive so I can execute a command such as the following with a partition name that is static across mountings: udisksctl unmount --object-path /media/greg/FD-ext4

Yesterday, I had my external USB hard drive (NTFS) connected to a client's laptop running Ubuntu 18 because I wanted to get some data off of it.

When I was done, I would normally type umount /media/dtweed/Seagate-4TB at the command prompt and then unplug the drive once the command prompt came back. But in this case, I had already closed all of my terminal windows, so I right-clicked on the drive icon on the desktop and selected "Safely remove hardware", and when the icon disappeared, I unplugged the USB cable. This has always worked fine on my own systems (up through Ubuntu 16), but apparently not here. I immediately got a pop-up saying "unable to stop /dev/sdd", and now the filesystem is corrupted.

Needless to say, I'm rather upset about this. It's almost a terabyte of data — not irreplaceable, but it's going to cost me several days to collect it all together in one place again if I can't repair the filesystem.

So, what is the correct way to initiate disconnecting an external drive and be sure that the system is finished updating it?

I'm using Ubuntu 17.10.

I formatted an USB pen-drive to NTFS to prepare a Windows7 USB Installer.

I set the bootable flag on this pen-drive and copied the files into it.

EDIT 1: The USB pen-drive is automatically mounted by udev.

umount /dev/sdb1 takes from 10 upto 12 minutes to complete.

Here are the mount options :

$ mount | grep sdb
/dev/sdb1 on /media/mansfeld/Win7_USB_Installer type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)

EDIT 2: The cp operation is not INSTANTANEOUS at all, it took 3 minutes to copy the files to the USB pen-drive.

EDIT 3: The sync operation (done right after the cp) took 12 minutes to complete ! But then the umount will be instantaneous.

For FAT32, (with sync also disabled during mount), I notice the same behaviour.

Any ideas why it takes so long to unmount NTFS USB pendrive ?

Do these have the same effect when the drive has only one big partition?

udisks --unmount /dev/sdb

udisks --unmount /dev/sdb1

Sometimes I mount my NTFS drives in Ubuntu but forget to unmount them before shutdown.

So does Ubuntu unmount them before shutdown or do I have to unmount them manually before shutdown?

I am asking this because I have forgot to unmount my NTFS partition many times and when I boot into my Windows, windows starts scanning for my disk sometimes.

Thanks.