iPhone 7/Plus How to eject mounted external USB drive?

[ian87w]

On Android, there’s a notification appears when you connect an external drive, allowing you to eject it before disconnecting. Make sense as often there’s no indicator on USB drives whether they are reading/writing.

But how does it work on iOS? There’s no indication of anything connected unless I go to the Files app and see the external drive there. And no indicator to unmount drive. I’m wondering wouldn’t this be dangerous and can result in file corruption? Did I miss anything?

 

[Analog Kid]

Someone else can probably give a more definitive answer, but I haven't seen a means to unmount and I've seen stories that pulling a FAT formatted drive can lead to corruption-- I'm guessing this means that iOS relies on journalling to maintain integrity.

 

[Shirasaki]

There is no way to “safely eject” an external storage device in any way, unlike macOS (which is still inferior compared to Windows).

 

[ian87w]

Yeah I like it that Windows has the "Quick removal" (no write caching) so I can just plug and unplug USB drives without worry. Funny how macOS doesn't consider this for external drives.

Anyway, sounds like using external USB is risky on iOS. Oh well, I thought I tried. The fact that I have to deal with compatible file system is extra annoying as well. This exercise reminds me why I moved to cloud storage.

 

[Shirasaki]

Yeah I like it that Windows has the "Quick removal" (no write caching) so I can just plug and unplug USB drives without worry. Funny how macOS doesn't consider this for external drives.

Anyway, sounds like using external USB is risky on iOS. Oh well, I thought I tried. The fact that I have to deal with compatible file system is extra annoying as well. This exercise reminds me why I moved to cloud storage.

I don’t trust cloud storage as my stuff could just disappear with or without notice. But that’s another discussion entirely.

As of right now, APFS is the only file system that has the best compatibility with iOS. Even HFS would result file corruption. I lost some critical documents because of that. Spent quite a bit to recover them.