to ext4 or not...

[David Kramer]

Stephen Adler wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> I just upgraded my desktop to fedora 11. The way I set up my system is 
> with my home directory in a separate partition so that if I want to do 
> an upgrade by reinstalling fedora, I can then reformat / and /boot 
> leaving /home directory is untouched.
> 
> But now there is ext4. So, should I leave /home as an ext3 file system? 
> Or should I go through the trouble of backing up /home, reformatting to 
> ext4 and restoring? Currently / is now ext4.

I would vote for a resounding "No".  If you'll remember, I posted a few
weeks ago how my wife's mail file was getting clobbered and corrupted
after rebuilding my server on Ubuntu Jaunty and using ext4 for my root
partition.  Moving /var/mail to an ext3 partition fixed the problem
completely, and that's all I changed.  Other than setting up a process
to back it up every two hours ;)

I'm really stuck now, though, because there's no way to get my root
partition back to ext3.  Since it's /, it's got /dev and /proc and other
things you can't just tar up.  So I've symlinked some critical things
like /var/mail to other filesystems.