When do files syncronize?

[Michael Collette]

Here on this Thinkpad T23 I normally just Fn-F4 to put it to sleep when moving 
it from work to home.  This had been working pretty well, with an occasional 
lock up still happening.  That much is a pretty well known problem.

This last Friday I did the usual Fn-F4 and brought my lappy on home.  What I 
didn't do was plug it back in until late Sunday.  Bad move, as my battery is 
starting to get on the weak side here.  Sure enough, lost power while it was 
in sleep mode.

Powering back up the system went through the usual post-crash fsck.  
Everything looked cool until I started up KMail.  Lost the entirety of my 
mail settings, which were anything but trivial.  I wrote up a pretty bitter 
bug report over on KDE's site.  I really wasn't in a good mood when this 
happened.

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58954

I then mentioned this problem on the KDE-FreeBSD mailing list.  I got some 
advice there to turn off all write cacheing via loader.conf.  Now that's 
done, my system seems to be a little bogged, but not too horribly bad.

With my sob story out of the way, here's my questions...

When this here Thinkpad goes into a sleep mode, is there any chit chat with 
the OS to be sure and syncronize any outstanding writes?

Would it be wiser to initiate going into sleep via software, such as KDE's 
laptop app or some other method?  Is there any difference?

Is there some way to force outstanding writes to clear their buffers before I 
put this box into sleep mode?


At some point I'd like to turn on write cacheing again.  I REALLY don't feel 
comfortable about it at this time though.  Is there some way to get a feeling 
of comfort back with this feature?

Later on,
-- 
"Always listen to experts.  They'll tell you what can't be done, and why.  
Then do it."
- Robert A. Heinlein