Minutes from the Technical Board, 2008-07-15

[Bram Neijt]

Hi Bryce,

I mostly suspend my laptop, so shutting it down and rebooting is not
really done that often. Which means that I hit the day count more then I
hit the mount count. If you want, you can change the mount based
counting to a higher number with tune2fs (see the -c option in man
tune2fs). So you could opt to run tune2fs -c 0 for your root system and
wait for the number of days to hit.

I think checking is something that needs to be done once in a while.
Once every 30 days seems like a minimum. Reading everything on disk will
make sure that the data is retained properly (and no error's occurred),
because as far as I know new drives will rewrite on every read to make
sure the data doesn't fade out.

Furthermore I don't think the up-time or amount of bytes written/read
will make the system more intelligent because even a unused harddisk
will start loosing data eventually. I'd be happy to hear more options if
people can come up with them, but I must admit that I can't think of
any.

Bram Neijt

On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 14:09 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:52:25AM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > == Filesystem checking / AutoFsck ==
> > 
> > A suggestion was made to the technical board that Ubuntu could be smarter
> > about how and when it performs filesystem integrity checks (fsck).
> > 
> > Decision: This should be discussed more widely in the developer community
> > Action: Scott to start a thread on ubuntu-devel/-discuss
> 
> I find the autofsck to be most notable on my laptop, perhaps because I
> reboot it more frequently, and because it usually chooses to autofsck at
> some inopportune time.  I don't know if laptop harddrives need fsck more
> than desktop's, but I wouldn't mind seeing the frequency be reduced for
> laptops.
> 
> Alternatively, maybe the autofsck could be made to take a few more
> factors into account, such as total run time since last fsck, total
> absolute time since last fsck, drive age, etc.
> 
> Bryce
>