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I copied a big file to my external hard disk, I saw this message after the progress bar disappeared. Does it mean the copy progress is still going on? If it is still going on why the progress bar stated finished and disappeared, bug?

王子1986
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1 Answers1

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the progress bar shows the work of application in charge of copy paste, the Applications's job is to Read the file(s) and tell OS to write them to destination , however if the Read Speed is faster than Write speed (in your case speed of External hard drive is slower than internal one) there is a chance that slower device falls behind. in that case what should be written in it goes to a queue. the warning you saw just says this Queue (IO operations that needs to be done) is not empty.

the same thing is there in Windows too , thats why you have to safely Remove Removable drives before detaching them. so some file won't be half written (and get unusable/corrupt later on due to this)

Related: https://askubuntu.com/a/558207/148011

Nav
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Bor691
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  • I don't think this is the right answer. I have an 8GB USB2.0 pen drive to which I copied a 1MB file. When I tried ejecting it, I had to wait for almost a minute for Ubuntu to show me the message that it was now safe for me to eject the pen drive. – Nav Oct 21 '17 at 03:54
  • It's a shame that the system window "copying files" finished but it really not. Period. The system MUST tell the user when it REALLY finished copying files, as it did in the previous Ubuntu releases... – user2342558 Aug 25 '23 at 08:57
  • @user2342558 it did? I don't recall previous ubuntu releases having done that either. it is theoretically possible to force a sync after copy and have the dialogue stay open until it is done. But for most copy operations (e.g. destination not being a removable device) the copied file is usable as soon as it is in the cache so the users probably won't care about details of write caches and would be annoyed at longer waits for no purpose. – Bor691 Aug 27 '23 at 07:25
  • Alternatively one might disable write caching for the device in question which would make the copy happen slower but there would be no delay afterwards for unmounting. One way of doing that is to add sync to the fstabs mount options of your device. this question has some answers on how to possibly automate adding that to removable usb devices. – Bor691 Aug 27 '23 at 07:34