I've got my new Raspberry Pi 2 running OpenElec and Kodi, plugged into my tv.
It's being powered by a USB port on the side of the TV, and so far this is working out great because the port is only being powered when the TV is on. It starts up with the TV and then loses power when the TV's off.
The general advice with any electronics would be 'make sure it shuts down properly before cutting power'. This makes sense with the risk of it being in the middle of writing data and causing corruption.
Is this risk major though? With the entire system existing on an 8GiB SD card, I figured the chance of actually breaking any file writes would be small. Even if I did corrupt something eventually, reinstalling OpenElec wouldn't be a hassle.
Do I run any risk of doing any real, long-term damage to my Pi using it like this? And if so, is there a simple solution?