Re: OT: Comparison of filesystems
Curt Howland wrote:
[snip]
My personal experience with ext2 was that the occasional power failure
or accidental hitting of the switch caused just too many problems. I
still let the fsck happen every 30 mounts or so, I don't turn that
off.
The incidence of accidental shutdown hasn't changed, but with ext3
there haven't been corruptions. It's not the "loss of data" that I'm
This is not my experience. My experience is that ext2 and ext3 are
similar in corruption, but ext3 hides that fact. It comes up fast
and "clean", but sometimes corrupt. I've never seen ext2 come up
corrupt after fsck. I've seen ext3 be declared "clean" by the
journal recovery, but be corrupt in a way that fsck could no longer
handle.
The issue I have is that ext2, when corrupted, is often repairable,
and when it is not you can know that, and often recover information.
OTOH, ext3 when it is corrupted and not repairable by the journal may
*think* that it is and try to repair using the journal, after which,
although it may be declared "clean", it is not even recoverable, let
alone repairable, by fsck or the journal.
IMO, doing a "repair" which clobbers the file system completely is
worse than not doing a repair and reporting a fatal error.
most worried about, especially on a desktop machine,
because "important" information is not being written all the time.
What I want to avoid is corruption, and the journal does a wonderful
job of keeping things clean and ordered, even if it's 5 seconds out
of date.
I guess that you and I have a different definition of "wonderful".
In the end, I put my machine on an UPS, so it isn't much of an
issue any more. Only the occasional system lockup causes me to
have to reboot unexpectedly. That's not quite true. Occasionally,
when I'm not around, the UPS runs down. But that is pretty rare.
If I spent the time, I could probably figure out how to make it
shut down when the UPS is about to run down, but I haven't investigated
that.
In any case, I do regular backups.
Mike
--
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!
Reply to: