I made it a habit to run `eject /dev/sda` (as root) before removing a USB stick. That flushes pending writes and makes it impossible for new writes to occur bef

I made it a habit to run `eject /dev/sda` (as root) before removing a USB stick. That flushes pending writes and makes it impossible for new writes to occur before the stick is removed and re-inserted. Just `sync` also works but it's asynchronous, so you don't really know how long to wait until the writes are flushed to disk (especially for USB sticks which can be really slow when writing).