It doesn't matter whether you store your personal data on the partition where the OS is located, or elsewhere. Either way, you may need to know how to run e2fsck on the file system if you want to try to maximally recover data. If you don't know what you are doing, sure, go ahead and run fsck -y. But there is the chance you may lose data that you might have been able to recover if you had more skills.
Note that in the case that you referenced, the kernel had already detected some kind of file system inconsistency. That is the source of the "/dev/sda1 contains a file system with errors, checked force". This should not happen, unless there is some kind of hardware bug, or kernel bug which has led to the file system getting corrupted. This could be caused by flaky/low-quality/failing memory, or flaky/low- quality/failing HDD or SSD. An expert would have to look at the kernel logs for hints to see what might have gone wrong. If the user has regularly been doing backups, then sure, maybe you don't care they can just run "fsck -y". But I don't want to give that advice, only to hear that some graduate student had ten years worth of thesis research, and it wasn't backed up, and they were using the lowest possible cost HDD or SSD that was not reliably storing their data. Sometimes, the best thing to do for low-comptency users, is for them to ask for help, maybe at a local Linux User's Group, so that an expert can try help them out. There is no magic incantation, no kind of "Hocus Pocus" magic set of instructions that will always do the right thing. And to give "low competency users" instructions which might not be the best thing is ultimately, IMHO, going to doing them a grave disservice. P.S. One could argue that a graduate student who has ten years of research on cheap sh*t storage and who hasn't been doing their backups doesn't deserve to graduate with a Ph.D. But that's not a very charitable attitude.... -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1939238 Title: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/1939238/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
