Re: Filesystem corruption

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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On Tuesday 29 May 2007 07:36:13 Toby Thain wrote:

> >> but you can't
> >> mention using reiserfs in mixed company without someone accusing
> >> you of
> >> throwing your data away.
>
> People who repeat this rarely have any direct experience of Reiser;
> they repeat what they've heard; like all myths and legends they are
> transmitted orally rather than based on scientific observation.

Well, there is one problem I vaguely remember that I don't think has been 
addressed, I think it was one of those lets-put-it-off-till-v4 things. It was 
the fact that there are a limited number of inodes (or keys, or whatever you 
call a unique file), and no way of knowing how many you have left until your 
FS will suddenly, one day refuse to create another file.

(For comparison, ext3 seems to support not only telling you how many inodes 
you have left, but tuning that on the fly.)

But, I haven't run into that, and the only problem I've had lately has been 
Reiser4 losing data, and crashing occasionally. I switched most of my data 
off of Reiser4 and onto XFS for that reason. I've also been using ext3 in 
some places, and Reiser3 in others (one place in particular where space is 
limited, but I will have tons of small files).

I later learned that XFS does out-of-order writes by default, making me think 
I should give up and invest in UPS hardware. But, switching away from Reiser4 
means I no longer see random files (including stuff in, for example, /sbin, 
that I hadn't touched in months) go up in smoke.

Ordinarily I like to help debug things, but not at the risk of my data. Maybe 
I'll try again later, and see if I can reproduce it in a VM or somewhere 
safe...

I do still follow the list, though, in case something interesting happens. It 
was fun while it lasted!

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