Re: Desktop Filesystem Benchmarks in 2.6.3

Felipe Alfaro Solana
2004-03-03T10:19:32Z

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 10:59, Robin Rosenberg wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 March 2004 10:43, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> > But XFS easily breaks down due to media defects. Once ago I used XFS,
> > but I lost all data on one of my volumes due to a bad block on my hard
> > disk. XFS was unable to recover from the error, and the XFS recovery
> > tools were unable to deal with the error.
>
> What file systems work on defect media?

It's not a matter of working: it's a matter of recovering. A bad disk
block could potentially destroy a file or a directory, but shouldn't
make a filesystem not mountable nor recoverable.

> As for crashed disks I rarely bothered trying to "fix" them anymore. I save
> what I can and restore what's backed up and recovery tools (other than
> the undo-delete ones) usually destroy what's left, but that's not unique to
> XFS. Depending on how good my backups are I sometimes try the recovery
> tools just to see, but that has never helped so far.

The problem is that I couldn't save anything: the XFS volume refused to
mount and the XFS recovery tools refused to fix anything. It was just a
single disk bad block. For example in ext2/3 critical parts are
replicated several times over the volume, so there's minimal chance of
being unable to mount the volume and recover important files.