On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 04:18:26PM -0500, Bernd Haug wrote: > A few words there - if you have to have both reiser and ext3, run the > live data on reiser and the backup on ext3. > > Reiser works well and is really fast - 'til it stops, and then it's > really, really, really no fun to repair it, if it works at all. > Having your live data on the slower system and the backups on the less > reliable really makes no sense as far as I can tell. > > The private drama around Reiser won't help the project have much of a > future either, as the driving force behind the FS is his company. > > Honestly, I'd just stay with ext3 for everything.
A couple of years ago, I might have agreed with jwschultz and disagreed with Bernd, but agree with him now for the reasons he states. A VERY BIG CAUTION for using ext3 - be SURE to make extra inodes when you make a partition for dirvish, because once you use all the inodes, you may have 60% of the data space in your partition available, but no way to write to it. Dirvish can end up writing a lot of little directories, and that chews up inodes a lot faster than it chews up data space, with all the hardlinking to data. A disappointment with a default ext3 partition drove me to ReiserFS for a couple of years. When I built my 500GB backup drives last year, I formatted my ext3 dirvish partitions with 2048 byte blocks and 1 inode per block; that was too many inodes, since those drives (with 8 months of backups so far and no expires) are at 57% data usage (df) and 6% inode usage (df -i). Those drives started at 30% data usage, so I expect to fill them in about another year (estimate), and use 15% of the inodes (wild estimate). If I did it again, I would still partition the drives with small blocks, but with 2 blocks per inode. 4 blocks per inode is possible, but then there is a non-zero possibility that I would use more than the expected 60% inodes, because of some unforseen change in the data mix. Your results will depend on your own data mix and backup configuration, of course. Perhaps we should collect some data from dirvish users, and see what the ratio of data to inode usage is in various circumstances. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
