<quote who="James Gregory"> > Right, and since XFS is meta-data journalling (like reiser), you have no > more protection of data integrity than with reiserfs. I have reiser on my > laptop, and xfs on my desktop machine. As you can image, the laptop loses > power far more often than the desktop machine does, yet I haven't been > able to find a situation where I've been able to convince reiser to > randomly fill my files with NULL characters. I can't say the same for XFS, > which has trashed a postgres database, my modules.conf file, my initrd.img > file, and other useful files. I can't tell you how happy I am that my home > directory is mounted on NFS these days.
I had a similar experience with XFS 1.0, but not with 1.2. > Your assertions about XFS having recovery tools are right though - I hear > they're very good, but I've never used them. So, this is why the XFS tools rock: I decided to shift my software RAID-1 system from ext3 to xfs, first by failing one of the disks, formatting it as XFS, copying the stuff over, and re-RAIDing it all against the XFS disk. It all started well. However, when my raidtools configuration file was not available (use mdadm at home, kids), I started formatting what I thought was the second RAID partition as ext3. Due to some autoconfiguration foo of /dev/md* definitions, it ended up formatting the entire XFS disk, which was the only copy at that stage. So, SNAFU: normal xfs filesystem, formatted as ext3, all data kaput (there were backups, but not of a few particularly critical things that I really cared about). The success of recovery depended on how much a mke2fs -j would barf up an xfs filesystem. Fairly okay, but still scary. The XFS recovery tool pulled 90% of the filesystem, and despite having an enormous amount of lost+found files to resort, all was well. Lucky for me, I chose to screw up badly with XFS. :-) - Jeff (who uses ext3 most of the time) -- linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia http://lca2004.linux.org.au/ "I don't want the world, I just want your half." - They Might Be Giants, Ana Ng -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
