[sclug] ext2 disaster recovery

[Will Dickson]

Will Dickson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've just had a power brownout which took down my server for about half 
>    a second. Now the root filesystem won't fsck.
> 
> Unfortunately, there are some important files on there, for which my 
> backups are rather badly out of date :-(.

Many thanks to everybody who responded.

In fact, it turned out that, even with a knackered root filesystem 
(inter alia, /usr wasn't there any more), the machine was sufficiently
alive that I could mount a zip disk and stream off the critical files,
which happily were OK. I was fairly impressed by that!

> 3. What's the situation with ext3 these days? The last time I read about 
> it, it was considered not quite ready for production use, but that was
> a while ago. 

FWIW, I initially decided to go for ext3. However, on my first attempt 
to use it (with SuSE 8.0) the installer decided to lock up halfway 
through. Since the installer was new-fangled, graphical, and useless, 
the only way out was a hard reset. At that point, I found out that the 
journalling obviously hadn't been on, because it failed fsck.

After that (arguably an unfair test), and also on philosophical grounds, 
I decided to go to ReiserFS instead. And Debian.