Reliable file systems

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 04:25:58PM +0000, Benjamin Roe wrote:

> I just had to hit the reset button during boot because of a hard lockup
> (due to athcool, I think). Anyway, I've always used XFS for my systems
> as it's been very reliable. However, this reboot seems to have
> completely killed the filesystem. I had to run xfs_repair to get the
> system to let me login, and even now half of /usr, most of apt's package
> lists and various other things are either in lost+found or just gone.

I've heard similar stories countless times from XFS users.

I recommend ext3 if the safety of your data is your primary concern.

> I can find benchmarks for Linux file systems, but nothing on their
> reliability. I've had this happen with Reiserfs and ext3, but had hoped
> that XFS would be better.

No filesystem can give you complete protection from hardware failures.  If
you are experiencing hard lockups due to CPU or memory problems, your data
can be corrupted long before being written to disk.

-- 
 - mdz