Necessity to unmount USB drives before removing it from the pc?

Hi, is it necessary to unmount the usb drive from a Linux based os before removing it from the pc? Because the other day I removed my pendrive without unmounting it and then when I went to use it in my windows based pc it showed the drive was corrupt and hence I lost all of my data.

Sorry for the dumb question, I am new to linux.

If you are sure your pen drive isnt in use then it can be hot-unplugged. Corruption occurs when someone unplugs a drive which is in use.
The unmount or unplug option in the os as well checks for the device in use by any process, file or explorer and shell.

I think it depends more on the Filesystem of the pendrive. NTFS is generally more resilient to corruption for hot-unpluged. As for data corruption it should have been easily recovered if it was a Filesystem corruption. It’s probably your data that got corrupt because of INCOMPLETE write task in the previous system.

I always do it on hard drives, can’t risk it. I like consistency so I do it on flash drives too.

Well i didn’t write anything on it, just that I used it to open a video file and then this problem occurred.

I wasn’t writing anything on it. Just used it to access a file.

Now I’ll always do that. Don’t want to get scolding from parents .