Corrupted files

[Eric Sandeen]

On 9/9/14 11:03 AM, Sean Caron wrote:

>Barring rare cases, xfs_repair is bad juju.

No, it's not.  It is the appropriate tool to use for filesystem repair.

But it is not the appropriate tool for recovery from mangled storage.

I've actually been running a filesystem fuzzer over xfs images, randomly
corrupting data and testing repair, 1000s of times over.  It does
remarkably well.

If you scramble your raid, which means your block device is no longer
an xfs filesystem, but is instead a random tangle of bits and pieces of
other things, of course xfs_repair won't do well, but it's not the right
tool for the job at that stage.

-Eric