HOW DO YOU PERFORM DISK CLEANUP AND DE FRAGMENT

[Nils Kassube]

Knapp wrote:
> No problem, I guess what I really want to know is why that check is
> needed and what it is checking. I can understand needing it, in the
> case of a power failure or software crash but why every 30 boots? It
> is disk maintenance as is the MS defrag in and this way I see it all
> being the same thing in the end from the users perspective.

Actually it is more like chkdsk but the difference isn't important for 
the end user - it _is_ irritating. Furthermore it isn't even improving 
the performance like defrag would do, it is only a precautionary 
measure. This is a warning from the tune2fs man page:

| You should strongly consider the consequences of disabling mount-
| count-dependent checking entirely. Bad disk drives, cables, memory,
| and kernel bugs could all corrupt a filesystem without marking the
| filesystem dirty or in error. If you are using journaling on your
| filesystem, your filesystem will never be marked dirty, so it will not
| normally be checked. A filesystem error detected by the kernel will
| still force an fsck on the next reboot, but it may already be too late
| to prevent data loss at that point. 

OTOH, I have never seen file system errors unless there was a dirty 
shutdown. Therefore I'm not convinced the check frequency is useful. And 
I don't use the mount count because I sometimes boot my machines several 
times a day. Instead I use the mount interval and I set it to at least 4 
weeks.


Nils