On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 07:42:48PM -0600, Dmitry Nikiforov wrote:
> So technically the whole purpose of this is to provide faster
> startup time after crash and not the consistency of data, correct?
yes
some fs' will journal all data though (reiserfs and ext3 can do this),
but it often comes at a significant performance penalty for no real
gain (and sometimes causes other problems like seeing old/stale data)
> In case of Mozilla and its e-mail accounts - subdirectories and
> files were there, but Mozilla didn't have the mailbox configuration,
> so I've had to create it again and then copy the mailbox data files
> over the newly created ones.
i have seen this... usually it's configuration files being written to
often, the metadat is logged but the datablocks aren't flushed. after
a reboot you get nulls and mozilla either pukes or ignores the
configuration (which is sensible)
mozilla could be a little better about this for critical files IMO
> As far as I can tell, they were being used at the moment of crash.
if they were being written to then i would expect nulls, but not
random data
> Power outage, or me being impatient when I need to restart my system
> (never caused any problems while I was using EXT3).
"sync + reboot/poweroff" should be pretty safe (even if not
recommended) --- fwiw i do it all the time and never have problems
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