Re: Big filesystems.

[Adam Skutt <askutt@wnec.edu>]

David Wood wrote:
> Just speaking in terms of Linux, did you really have as many problems 
> with the more popular filesystems as the less popular ones?
Yes, I have had them.  To be fair, these days, the only times I hear of 
ext2/ext3 crashing is on older kernels and when someone was doing 
something they weren't supposed to (like running the HDD full tilt and 
cutting the power).

So ext2/ext3 seem pretty stable, and when a major bug appears, it seems 
to be fixed within 24 hours typically (usually by an immediate kernel 
release).

So yes, the more widely-used ones seem less likely to crash and cause 
data corruption under "normal" circumstances, these days.  Same wasn't 
true of 2.0/2.2 though ;)  I personally haven't had a ext2/ext3 crash in 
years, but my ext2/ext3 system also tend to not take as much abuse; 
these days, I use ext3 for /, /usr, /boot and XFS for everything else.

That being said, I don't consider anything but ext2/3 to be widespread 
enough to apply this to.

YMMV in all this of course, I just wanted to point that every filesystem 
on every platform I've ever used (production or otherwise) has failed me 
at one point or another, so taking frequent backups is criticial ;)

Adam