Avoid loss on freezes

[Scott J. Henson]

Pupeno wrote:
> Hello,
> I'd like to avoid as much as possible the loss of data in the often freezes 
> that I have on my notebook (between two and five a week). Any 
> recommendation ? something like avoid buffering as much as possible on 
> reiserfs ? both my partitions are reiserfs.
> Thank you.
> 

IMO, the best way to prevent data loss from frequent freezes
is to prevent the freezes.  Do you have any idea on why its
freezing?  Maybe we could help you solve that problem so you
don't have to worry about data loss.

As for your actual question, I believe you should be looking
to change the commit interval.  I'm not sure how to do that
in reiserfs.  Also, Ive had better experience with ext3.  In
ext3 you would set the commit mount option.  You would put
commit=1 next to defaults in /etc/fstab for the file system
you want to do that on.

Be warned though, lowering the commit interval is the
quickest way to destroy any performance your system has.
Like I said above, the proper way to fix your problem is to
fix the freezes, not work around them.

Also, lowering the commit interval or even making your file
system synchronous, won't guarantee that your data hits the
disk before the freeze.  The hard drive has a cache that can
cause data loss as well.