I developed a habit (more a tick, really) of invoking sync on Linux. Not just because of shutdown behavior, but because of crash behavior. The Linux filesystem didn't recover very gracefully on a crash, so many times I found myself having to reinstall Linux.
3.5" floppy disks, the media I had to use to install Linux, had a penchant for corrupting themselves while sitting in my desk drawer. A Slackware disk set required something like 8 or 10 or more disks, invariably one of which would have gone bad. I only had a 2400 baud modem, so downloading a replacement disk took forever, and that's after I was lucky enough to find a free BBC (or later SLIP/PPP) line. And because you would only discover a corrupted disk during installation, the process of reinstalling Linux could easily take 1 or 2 sleepless nights given it might happen midway through an install, requiring a reboot back into Windows for downloading and then restarting the process from scratch. (I had high school during the day, and part-time work many week nights.)
So, yeah, a handful of bad experiences and to this day I sync almost religiously. Until recently I would sync three times in a row, manually, presumably because I had picked up the mythic BSD advice somewhere.
I was also fortunate to have had my first accidental `rm -fr /` experience back then, which makes me far more cautious in interactive shell sessions than many others, sometimes to their impatience. Because I had already learned my lesson and became reflexively cautious, I absolutely hated Red Hat Linux, which aliased common commands to request confirmation before destructive operations.
