filesystem for mail

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006, Kurt Wall wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:01:01PM +0100, Jorge Almeida wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Kurt Wall wrote:
>> 
>> >
>> > XFS. I don't think Reiser's arrest will necessarily affect ReiserFS, but
>> > I would opt for XFS for reasons of technical superiority and speed.
>> >
>> Any reliability problems, like the ones mentioned by Michael?
>
>Not here. At the end of the day, if you're cranking on a file system
>and the power goes away, there will be transactions in core that never
>make it to the on-disk journal. I'm not aware of _any_ file system that
>guarantees data integrity in such a situation. Rather, it will just roll 
>back to the last known good state. What good journaling does is minimize
>the amount of data loss and offer fast recovery when it does happen.
>Nevertheless, I've _never_ lost data on XFS, including when I
>deliberately yanked the powe during a kernel compile to see what would
>happen.

I have only had one significant problem with an xfs file systems system on
a SuSE 9.0 Pro system after a less-than-graceful reboot.  The major problem
I had was that fsck.xfs is basically a no-op, and it took me a while to
figure out that I had to run xfs_repair to fix things.

After doing this several times over a period of months, there came a time
when xfs_repair didn't.  I then made a jfs file system on the drive, an
external FireWire used for backups, and haven't had any problems since June
27th.

Bill
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