I usually know if I have any programs reading from or writing to my USB sticks. As a rule of thumb, I only unplug devices when no program is (or should be) usin

I usually know if I have any programs reading from or writing to my USB sticks. As a rule of thumb, I only unplug devices when no program is (or should be) using it. I never had any issues with that. Although I sometimes had a terminal session open with the cwd on that device (or a GUI file explorer), but other than 'no such file or directory', I didn't ever run into any problems with this at all.