From: Rob Landley Subject: Re: [patch] ext2/3: document conditions when reliable operation is possible Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:34:52 -0500 Message-ID: <200908262234.54586.rob@landley.net> References: <20090824093143.GD25591@elf.ucw.cz> <20090824230036.GK29763@elf.ucw.cz> <20090825000842.GM17684@mit.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Pavel Machek , Ric Wheeler , Florian Weimer , Goswin von Brederlow , kernel list , Andrew Morton , mtk.manpages@gmail.com, rdunlap@xenotime.net, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, corbet@lwn.net To: Theodore Tso Return-path: Received: from static-71-162-243-5.phlapa.fios.verizon.net ([71.162.243.5]:44841 "EHLO grelber.thyrsus.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753115AbZH0DfM (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:35:12 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20090825000842.GM17684@mit.edu> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Monday 24 August 2009 19:08:42 Theodore Tso wrote: > And if your > claim is that several hundred lines of fsck output detailing the > filesystem's destruction somehow makes things all better, I suspect > most users would disagree with you. Suppose a small office makes nightly backups to an offsite server via rsync. If a thunderstorm goes by causing their system to reboot twice in a 15 minute period, would they rather notice the filesystem corruption immediately upon reboot, or notice after the next rsync? > In any case, depending on where the flash was writing at the time of > the unplug, the data corruption could be silent anyway. Yup. Hopefully btrfs will cope less badly? They keep talking about checksumming extents... > Maybe this came as a surprise to you, but anyone who has used a > compact flash in a digital camera knows that you ***have*** to wait > until the led has gone out before trying to eject the flash card. I doubt the cupholder crowd is going to stop treating USB sticks as magical any time soon, but I also wonder how many of them even remember Linux _exists_ anymore. > I > remember seeing all sorts of horror stories from professional > photographers about how they lost an important wedding's day worth of > pictures with the attendant commercial loss, on various digital > photography forums. It tends to be the sort of mistake that digital > photographers only make once. Professionals have horror stories about this issue, therefore documenting it is _less_ important? Ok... Rob -- Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds