[Gllug] Reiserfs gotchas?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 11:52:49AM +0100, Alain Williams wrote:
> 
> Although I have had no problems with reiser (& I do use it), I am told that when
> reiser fails it can do so big time -- and the recovery tools aren't too nice.
> I don't know if that is a 'it screwed me 2 years ago' type story, or if there
> are still gremlins around.

In my experiance the recovery tools still need some more work to get to
the kind of reliability i'm accustomed to with the ext2 fsck tools. 

I tried reiser out on my root fs the middle of last year, and after four or
five unclean shutdowns in a row (issues with nVidia X driver / oracle) the
filesystem wouldn't pass  the bootup check. The reiser recovery tool warned 
about finding lots of unattached nodes, but rather than saving to lost+found,
it simply deleted them - I basically lost the whole of the /usr/X11, /var,
& /opt hierarchies just from a couple of unclean shutdowns :(

By comparison, with hardware failure on an old drive (bad sectors
everywhere) ext2 fsck managed to completely recover the filesystem
serveral times over, giving me the opportunity to backup most of my
important data. Thus I'd go for ext3 for the most part. 

BTW, while we're talking journalling, does anyone have any 
experiance / comments about XFS or JFS ?

Dan.
-- 
|=-               http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt             -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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