That is not true, Dan. There is absolutely no way that one can be "certain" that an application write to persistent storage occurred at all UNLESS the application terminated cleanly *OR* the application told the Operating System and File System to "make it so" from time to time. Some people may view this as a "feature", ill-conceived though it may be. Without detailed information there is absolutely no way to determine that the combination of "application", "filesystem" and "operating system" in use does not implement this "feature" given that "make it so" has been explicitly disabled, and the application has not exited cleanly. In other words, "make it so" must be re-instated and see if the result is the same. If it is not, then clearly one must issue periodic "make it so" commands to the filesystem and operating system in order to bypass this "feature". NB: "make it so" means to force the synchronization of persistent storage with the application view of that storage at the time the command to "make it so" is given.