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  • usbimagerusbimager
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  • #38

Closed
Open
Opened Dec 27, 2020 by Shasheen Ediriweera@shasheene

Hiding, labeling and warning users about non-removable drives to maximize user safety

As mentioned in #37 (closed), I have a lot of newbies using my Linux distribution and I hope to switch away from recommending balenaEtcher as USBImager is high-quality and lightweight.

But the current latest version of USBImager (v1.0.5) makes it way too easy for newbie users to accidentally overwrite a system drive:

usbimager.1 usbimager.2 usbimager.3 usbimager.4

There isn't any confirmation message before the disk starts being overwritten. I know you're aiming for simplicity, but I think it's worth taking some simple actions to prevent newbie users from accidentally overwriting some potentially important drive, and stop advanced users from making a fatal misclick.

Consider the balenaEtcher user experience below. About a year ago, it has started hiding system disks from users behind a "show hidden" button. Also large disks are displayed with a clear label. This produces the following user-experience:

(The final screenshot doesn't get displayed when overwriting a small removable drive)

These changes have provided vast improvements in the usability of balenaEtcher. Even for myself (a knowledgeable user), I find these features incredibly reassuring: the risk of misclicking and overwriting the wrong disk is vastly reduced, which reduces my anxiety around writing ISO images to disks. This safety is so reassuring that when I regularly create Rescuezilla test USB sticks I have been choosing balenaEtcher over 'dd', despite balenaEtcher being a bloated and inefficient Electron app.

I hope you consider some of these improvements. Even something as simple as adding a colored label for large disks and system disks would help. The warning label and an "Are You Sure" confirmation for disks USBImager knows are not removable is also advised.

Edited Dec 27, 2020 by Shasheen Ediriweera
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Reference: bztsrc/usbimager#38