[Klug-general] Be careful with ext4

[Alan Pope]

2009/6/27 Michael E. Rentell <michael.rentell at ntlworld.com>:
> WRONG! As a part of the reinstallation of 2008.1 I noticed a slight
> change in the 'Which partition to format' routine. It just said that it
> was reformatting / rather than asking whether to reformat / and /home.
> So, anyway, I clicked 'yes'.
>
> DISASTER! It had not recognised the ext4 file system so it didn't know I
> had two partitions. It formatted the lot and I lost everything.
>

That's far from a problem with ext4, and more a problem with the
Mandriva installer coupled with user error surely?

> So here's a friendly warning. If you upgrade to ext4 there's no going
> back gracefully. Also, keep up-to-date backups - disaster comes
> unexpectedly.
>

You _can_ go back from ext4 to ext3, and even back to ext2. It may not
be something the Mandriva installer supports, but it's certainly
possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

"The ext3 file system is partially forward compatible with ext4, that
is, an ext4 filesystem can be mounted as an ext3 partition (using
"ext3" as the filesystem type when mounting). However, if the ext4
partition uses extents (a major new feature of ext4), then the ability
to mount the file system as ext3 is lost."

Cheers,
Al.