After you’ve transfered all your data on/off, why cant you simply take out the stick? where’s the harm?
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As others have pointed out, there’s a chance that part of your files or filesystem data haven’t made it out to the USB device yet, leading to corruption if you pull the device out prematurely. What makes things worse is that the system might not be in a hurry to get the data out. When you hit “eject” or “safely remove media” or whatever, that tells the OS to get that data pushed out the door, *and* mark the filesystem on the device as “clean”, *and* unmount the device from the computer’s file systems.
Windows has a nice feature where whenever it doesn’t have anything better to do, it goes ahead and pushes the data out and marks the file system as clean even if not actually unmounted. This means that if you do yank the device out without notice, there’s a good chance that nothing’s damaged, and I think the OS knows not to complain under those circumstances. Mac and Linux probably do the same thing, but lack the “nah, it’s cool” feature.
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