On Wed, February 11, 2009 12:23, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >> >> Then again, I've never lost data during the learning period, nor on the >> rare occasions where I just get it wrong. This is good; not quite >> remembering to eject a USB memory stick is *so* easy. > > With Windows and OS-X, it is up to the *user* to determine if they > have lost data. This is because they are designed to be user-friendly > operating systems. If the disk can be loaded at all, Windows and OS-X > will just go with what is left. If Windows and OS-X started to tell > users that they lost some data, then those users would be in a panic > (just like we see here).
I don't carry much on my memory stick -- mostly stuff in transit from one place to another. Two things that live there constantly are my encrypted password database, and some private keys (encrypted under passphrases). So the stuff on the memory stick tends to get looked at, and the stuff that lives there is in a format where corruption is very likely to get noticed. So while I can't absolutely swear that I never lost data I didn't notice losing, I'm fairly confident that no data was lost. And I'm absolutely sure no data THAT I CARED ABOUT was lost, which is all that really matters. > The whole notion of "journaling" is to intentionally lose data by > rolling back to a known good point. More data might be lost than if > the task was left to a tool like 'fsck' but the journaling approach is > much faster. Windows and OS-X are highly unlikely to inform you that > some data was lost due to the filesystem being rolled back. True about journaling. This applies to NTFS disks for Windows, but not to FAT systems (which aren't journaled); and memory sticks for me are always FAT systems. Databases have something of an all-or-nothing problem as well, for that matter, and for something of the same reasons. -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
