Usually there are no issues, you can easily unmount from the desktop or cmd, however sometimes windows warns that files are still open and forcing the system to unmount a share might lead to data corruption although nothing is being transferred to or from the share. I never thought of this as an issue, but is data corruption possible to occur in that case? and what is the best/safest way to force windows to unmount the share in this case?

 

Thnx

11 hours ago, Mat1926 said:

Usually there are no issues, you can easily unmount from the desktop or cmd, however sometimes windows warns that files are still open and forcing the system to unmount a share might lead to data corruption although nothing is being transferred to or from the share. I never thought of this as an issue, but is data corruption possible to occur in that case? and what is the best/safest way to force windows to unmount the share in this case?

 

Thnx

 

Windows can't force any file-system corruption on a unRAID share by disconnecting. It's only when Windows owns the actual file system, that unexpected disconnect can introduce file system issues - this is something that may affect a USB-connected local disk that you unplug while it is still in use.

 

In this case, it's unRAID that owns the file systems and only offers an API to perform browsing and read/write operation on files/directories stored in the shares.

 

But if a Windows application has a file open for write, then that file could become corrupted because the application still has not written out all intended changes. This is a reason why lots of programs has a functionality where they make file writes to a temporary file and as a last step makes the temporary file replace the original file. So a network loss halfway through the save just means there is a partial temporary file while the original file is left with the original content.

On 1/25/2018 at 1:11 PM, pwm said:

 

Windows can't force any file-system corruption on a unRAID share by disconnecting.

 

Thnx, so you say if I ever got that message again, and assuming that no file manipulation/transfer is occurring, it is perfectly safe just to ignore that warning and force dismount the share...correct?

Yes - Windows can never break the underlying file system of one of the unRAID shares since Windows isn't given access rights to the raw file system block data.

 

If you share the flash drive, then Windows edits can make the flash unbootable - but that's a separate issue from damaging the actual file system.

 

There exists plugins for unRAID that can allow you to see open files, so you will know which files that Windows may potentially keep open. The command smbstatus that can be run from the command line of unRAID will indicate which computers that have connected to different shares, and if the network clients has locked any resources on the Samba server. I'm not sure if there exists any ways where you can see the output of smbstatus directly on the web page.