Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel
On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 12:29:51PM +1000, Ian Perry wrote:
> :>OK, the two messages previous posts kind of play off eachother so I'm
> :>going to reply to them in one go. First off ext2, it has a really bad
> :>habit of losing files in hard crashes and power outages, this isn't a
> :>problem for someone like you or I as we know how to recover them, for a
> :>student with no root and no knowledge of how to do this, it's called a
> :>couple of hours work down the tubes.
> :
> :I have to say, I've never lost a file to an ext2 disk crash, nor even
> :had to go any further than the odd prompted "run fsck manually" to
> :recover it,
>
> On extremely flaky hardware, such as Colin goes on to describe, I have
> "lost" file on ext2, but only in extreme cases. And I put "lost" in
> quotes because I know that they're in the lost-found directory, just
> with a weird name and some careful use of `file` and `grep` has gotten
> them back. Though honestly even with crashes under load this doesn't
> often happen, and even in the rare cases when it does 99% of those are
> just netscape cache files I don't care about.
>
> NTFS and FAT on the other hand I've lost system files that render the
> machine unbootable (happened on 3 systems in the past 2 months), I
> haven't lost a file on ext2 ever and the last "lost" file was about 6
> months ago.
>
> Linux beats out M$ in my lab atleast 2 to 1. The only Un*x system
> I've really had a lot of trouble with was a Solaris UFS file system on
> a very old drive that just went insane while mounted and under heavy
> NFS use (got that back with fsck too, eventually).
>
> So in my experience ext2 is much more robust than M$ offerings.
> Reiserfs is *probably* a bit better <hearsay>though I hear when
> journaled filesystems do manage to get wedged it's all over
> </hearsay>. RAID mirroring is also an option for the paranoid (not to
> suggest paranoia is always unwarrented), but this is probably a bit
> more technicaly complex than you want to get.
The situation I'm reffering to here is that of someone who might see a temporary
interface slowdown or crash(happen quite often in office suites of any kind),
and having no knowledge of how linux works, just hits the reset button(this
could easily get repeated a whole bunch of times throughout the day in a school
environment, and would do all kinds of nasty things to the fs). The background
you seem to be coming from is some kind of server farm or similar setup where
the users are all at least competent enough not to do lots of hard resets.
Generally speaking, Linux with ext2 is probably the worst OS I've ever worked
with for recovering from mundane stuff like that, but I do agree with you that
it is much better than most as far as low instance of failure due to actual bugs
within the filesystem are concerned. I don't see how RAID mirroring is an
option though, as it would only serve to guard against mechanical failure, which
is sort of beyond the ability of a filesystem to affect one way or the other.
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