A few years ago I finally bought a USB drive to read an old 3.5" floppy from the late '90s on which I had archived my e-mail messages before moving away to college. I completely forgot about write protection (as well as atime write-backs). I managed to read a surprising amount of data off of the disk, but I think less than if I had remembered to write-protect the disk before inserting it into the drive. The files were in mbox format, probably from Eudora, but possibly Pine. As is my habit, I first poked around with ls and less before copying the files over, and I'm pretty sure I ended up with more corruption than what I first saw with less.
Oh well. The irony is that to this day I have a tick of idly running `sync` at the command prompt, which I developed dealing with floppy and hard disk corruption running early versions of Linux. A crash or (IIRC) even a simple reboot sometimes resulted in disk corruption preventing Linux from booting. Reinstalling Slackware from floppy disks took quite awhile on its own, especially if installing the X11 disk sets, but half the time at least one of the disks would be corrupted, requiring me to download a fresh copy (using Windows--I was dual booting) over my 2400 baud modem, and then restarting the install from scratch. I probably went through this procedure at least a half dozen times, or at least enough to develop the tick. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... =)
There was a time when the sync CLI exited before the work was done, so you actually didn't want sync;sync;halt, typing it as separate commands gave it the right amount of time to complete.
