[sclug] ext2 disaster recovery

[Andy Arbon]

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Hello,

I thought I'd chip in with some real-world experience of ext3's
reliability.. I live in a student house with a key electricity meter,
and being lazy students we never remember to charge the key until it
runs out, so we get about 2 power cuts a week, every week.

I've got 2 ext3 linux machines (desktop & server) on this network and my
housemate has another 3 (2 desktop & 1 server) and we've never had any
filesystem corruption at all after a power cut even though machines have
been in every state from idle to mid-huge-compliation (I use gentoo ;) )
when they've gone down.

Not exactly conclusive, I know, but a satisfied customer testimonial. It
does what it says on the tin ;)

As a side note: we recently found that another crappy low spec linux
machine on the network (the router/firewall/dns) that we thought was
ext3 was only running ext2, but it's survived because 10 minutes after
booting the disk gets powered down and never touched again ;)

Cheers,

Andy
|
|>Am I correct in thinking that if I'd had ext3 rather than
|>ext2 I wouldn't be in this mess?
|
| Maybe, maybe not. ext3 won't prevent files from getting corrupted (because
| they're half-written, or because disc blocks got damaged) but the
filesystem
| metadata (directory contents, date, time, etc) should always be sane,
if not
| as up-to-date as you might expect.
|


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