Re: [gentoo-user] Good file system that recovers from a power failure.

[William Kenworthy]

On Fri, 2010-12-31 at 19:12 -0600, Dale wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 00:27 on Saturday 01 January 2011, Dale did
> > opine thusly:
> >
> >
> >
> >>> It's my opinion that reiser is in security-fix-only mode from whoever is
> >>> maintaining it. If everything else around it stays the same, the fs will
> >>> obviously continue working just as it always did. But the surrounding
> >>> system is not stable, it changes rapidly, especially in kernel space, so
> >>> the odds are stacked against reiser for bitrot. For all these reasons, I
> >>> regretfully switched my own systems over to ext4 some time ago. Rieser
> >>> was a good fs whose time has come and gone and I no longer had warm and
> >>> fuzzies about the future with it.
> >>>
> >> I'm not sure I EVER saw a update to reiserfs.  I was hoping it was just
> >> that good.  lol
> >>
> >> This is also the reason I was considering moving to ext4 or something.
> >> How has ext4 been treating you since the switch?  I also assume you have
> >> UPSs as well?
> >>
> > It's still early days, but ext4 has been good here on all machines. I don't
> > have a UPS (couldn't be bothered really...) so the UPS is the device's
> > battery. Which means me doing something really stupid and locking the machine
> > up is the most common reason for hard reboots. It survived every time so far.
> >
> >
>
> That sounds good.  Your situation is not a theory but real and in
> practice.  We all know what happens to theories.   :-(
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>

As someone who suffered from a rare, but fatal bug in some kernel
updates to reiserfs3 which were only fixed in a recent versions, I can
say yes, its still being actively maintained.

But, I am thinking its time to move on - in particular something that
can fsck online (my mythtv and backup archives on reiserfs have to be
done offline and its takes hours to do terrabytes!) and still be robust.

I use "dirvish" for backups which creates a LOT of hardlinks which can
be very hard on a file system.  ext2 typically lasts only a few cycles,
while ext3 is only a little better even with full journalling.  Coupled
to the fact neither is very good with power cuts and they are a worst
case choice for data security :)

Reiserfs3 by contrast is very very good, with only a few instances of
problems over many years (since beore 3 was even in the kernel) - none
of which have lost critical data or file systems (ext2/3 devs, are you
listening :)  Even the "slowpath" bug I ran into just required a kernel
downgrade and an fsck until later kernel versions fixed the bug.

I am now trying btrfs and am very impressed.  On line fsck is wonderful
and I have had one instace of corruption due to a flakey hard disk - the
partition is on lvm so I moved it to another disk in the array and its
been solid since - didnt lose it or any any data.  The dirvish backups
are fast enough (impression only, no timings) but large scale deleted
(60Gb copies of laptops etc) are much slower than reiserfs.  My only
"glitch" has been dirvish/btrfs inability to deal with a ".gvfs" file in
some home directories - it has some wierd permissions but an exclusion
from the backup regime bypasses it.  reiserfs doesn't have a problem
with it.

So, for me at least, btrfs is looking like the way forward.  Its in
"testing" at the moment, but I am ready to move whole systems over to
it.

BillK



-- 
William Kenworthy <billk@×××××××××.au>
Home in Perth!