I normally watch quietly from the sidelines but I think it's important to get some balance here; our customers between them run many hundreds of multi-terabyte arrays and when something goes badly awry it generally falls to me to sort it out. In my experience xfs_repair does exactly what it says on the tin.
I can recall only a couple of instances where we elected to reformat and reload from backups and they were both due to human error: somebody deleted the wrong raid unit when doing routine maintenance, and then tried to fix it up hemselves.
In theory of course xfs_repair shouldn't be needed if the write barriers work properly (it's a journalled filesystem), but low-level corruption does creep in due to power failures / kernel crashes and it's this which xfs_repair is intended to address; not massive data corruption due to failed hardware or careless users.
-- Roger Hey, just sharing some hard-won (believe me) professional experience. I have seen xfs_repair take a bad situation and make it worse many times. I don't know that a filesystem fuzzer or any other simulation can ever provide true simulation of users absolutely pounding the tar out of a system. There seems to be a real disconnect between what developers are able to test and observe directly, and what happens in the production environment in a very high-throughput environment.
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