On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:04:23PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 09:36:38AM +0100, LukÃÅ Czerner wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Feb 2013, Chris Murphy wrote:
> >
> > > Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:29:59 -0700
> > > From: Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > To: Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Cc: Karel Zak <kzak@xxxxxxxxxx>, LukÃÅ Czerner <lczerner@xxxxxxxxxx>,
> > > xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx, sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx, Zach Brown <zabrown@xxxxxxxxxx>,
> > > linux-btrfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > > Subject: Re: [PATCH] xfs_mkfs: wipe old signatures from the device
> > So I
> > think that it got to the point where users will usually use mkfs.xfs
> > -f all the time. And even if they did not and they would use a wrong
> > device they would probably get the same warning even for the device
> > they wanted to use in the first place.
>
> I get a couple of queries a year from people saying they
> accidentally ran mkfs.ext4 on the wrong device and want to know if
> they can recover their XFS filesystem. The next question is usually
> "why didn't mkfs.ext4 warn me there was an existing filesystem on
> the device like mkfs.xfs does?".
>
> That is why the "don't overwrite an existing filesystem by default"
> behaviour is important. Users like to be protected from mistakes
> they weren't aware they made, and far too few of our filesystem
> utilities provide that safety net.
>
> A couple of users a year losing data like this is a couple of users
> too many. Especially when it would only take a couple of hours of
> your time to implement....
>
> > So even thoug it might help in some cases I do not think that we
> > should go and change all file systems to do that as well, it would
> > not be very useful anyway.
>
> Tell that to the next user that trashes their data because a
> filesystem tool simply assumed in correctly that it owned the block
> device.
We had someone on IRC a day or two ago who had done exactly this.
They're not the only one -- I can recall seeing at least one other
person who managed to mkfs.btrfs on an existing filesystem.
Hugo.
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