I have a USB drive connected to my WD TV Live (2011 Model) which is formatted as NTFS.
Today I connected to it over the network on a Mac and copied some more videos to it. However I put the unit on standby forgetting that I had my mac connected to it. When I turned it back on all the videos I’d copied across were gone, even some that I had copied over an hour previous (but in the same session).
Why is it that if I don’t unmount the network share all the files are lost? To me it’s quite a strange behavour brecause if I were to plug an NTFS formatted USB drive connected straight to a computer and unplug it without unmounting; OK it’s bad practice, but you don’t lose everything that was written.
It’s annoying because I deleted some of the stuff off my Mac after the file copy had finished.
First off, let me point out that you posted in the forum for the OLD WDTV Live (2009) model. The 2011 model has its own section here: http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming-Media/ct-p/wdtvlive_streaming
Samba and NFS will not necessarily commit changes to a file system in real time.
When it opens files, It obtains “locks” on files, under the assumption that the other end (the server) will notify it if the lock needs to be released.
If that doesn’t happen, then parts of the file system contents are only kept active in memory on the CLIENT, and don’t get sent to the server (the WD) until the locks are released. Doing this dramatically improves performance on network file systems, because the client doesn’t spend so much time waiting for things to happen on the server.
If a client does not (or cannot) CLOSE or UNMOUNT a file system before it disappears, it may not ever have the chance to commit those changes to the server, which would then commit them to disk.
So that’s the technical discussion.
HOWEVER. Just putting it in STANDBY shouldn’t have this effect you describe… The connection should stay UP and ACTIVE the whole time, because STANDBY doesn’t actually close the network connection.
I leave my desktop PC connected to my Live for days (even weeks) at a time… it’s permanently “mounted” as a mapped drive. In that time, my SMP will be put in standby and awakened MULTIPLE times… And sometimes even rebooted.
So, in short, I think you have something else going on that’s not directly related to forgetting to unmount the volume…
