interesting note on fsck and journalled filesystems

Glenn Burkhardt gbburkhardt at aaahawk.com
Sun Jan 11 14:34:25 EST 2004


> The reason to use a journalling file system has more to
> do with crash recovery time than with integrity. IMHO, most Unix/Linux
> file systems run without any significant problems for years.

Crash recovery has been more of an issue at our shop than most, because we use 
Unix/Linux in factory equipment.  People are turning the power off all the 
time without doing a shutdown.  Journalling filesystems have been a big plus.  
It's such a hassle to try to get a non-computer type to punch in 
"fsck -y /dev/sd0a", or something like it.  I could never understand the 
current reason for requiring a user to type in an fsck command anyway (not 
just limited to Linux, Solaris does it, too).  I knew one graduate student 
when I was in school that would actually repair inodes and recover files, but
I've meet no one else since then that would know what to do.



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