File system beliefs are rooted in experience

[Erast Benson]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 07:43 -0700, Ian Soutar wrote:
> I do installations for poor people of linux in Victoria BC Canada.   I 
> was worried about the integrity of data because I cannot afford to 
> endlessly fix file systems for these computers.   I went around town to 
> ISP groups and others who ran large file systems on linux.   Everyone I 
> spoke to suggested ext3 as the most reliable and everyone had lost data 
> with these other file systems except ext3.  I spoke to about 8 people 
> who were internet service provider tech support guys.
> 
> This matches my experience where I have lost data seriously on reiser 
> and xfs.   My worst experiences are on reiser.   Now the common thing in 
> my experience is that I used several laptops where power failures at 
> in-opportune times simply happen and cannot always be avoided.  Laptops 
> are becoming the main line computers of the future.
> 
> Ext3 has always survived and the journal has never been corrupted.   
> However it is reassuring to know that I could drop back to ext2 to 
> recover the data.
> 
> My strong belief is the the old and slow ext3 is by far the safer way to go.

FYI. If Linux kernel is not really matters, you could try Ubuntu-based
Nexenta. It offers ZFS. Very impressive and advanced filesystem of these
days. In fact, it is more than just filesystem. It does mirror,
optimized raid-6, compression, quota, reservation, variable block size,
etc. Bellow is screencast of its selfhealing feature:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/selfheal/

-- 
Erast