media-remount-syncd

In GNU/Linux distros everything is mounted with write caching enabled by default. This causes some nuissances with external storage devices:

• progress statuses display the progress of writing to cache instead of the actual write operation to the device itself
• data to be written is often still waiting in the cache after progress statuses show completition, causing people to mistakenly pull out devices prematurely
• "safely removing" devices finally forces data to be actually written, but without any indication of how much time this will take

media-remount-syncd is an experimental workaround for the issues above.

It is a simple shell script that runs in the background as a systemd service and automatically remounts any new mounts in the /media directory with the sync option, which disables write caching. It uses findmnt --poll=mount to detect new mounts, then remounts them using mount -o remount,sync.

Install

sudo ./install.sh

Test

Plug-in (and mount) some external storage device, then run:

systemctl status media-remount-syncd.service

The output should contain "mount -o remount,sync" log lines.

Uninstall

sudo ./remove.sh