On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Hilco Wijbenga
<hilco.wijbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] So when I needed to install a
> new machine, I looked around and settled on JFS. This box has been
> running for about half a year now (so that includes several power
> failures) without any problems. I certainly am very pleased with JFS
> so perhaps you might want to consider it.
I've also used (and still use) JFS on a lot of partitions (LVM
actually), from my laptops (both rotating and SSD), desktop, VM's,
etc. I've moved to it a few years ago after getting tired of all the
Ext3 fsck's.
Although JFS is quite "efficient", and didn't create too much
trouble --- never lost an entire file-system, never corrupted data,
etc. --- it does have a few quirks:
* "empty files" after panics --- I think in this regard it's not
JFS's fault, but actually badly written software, because things go
like this: say you edit a file, save it, and immediately (a few
seconds) get either a panic or power failure, the result is an empty
file; the technical details are like this: some software first
truncate the file, write to it, and close it, but don't sync the data,
thus you end up with an empty file; as said I think JFS is correct
here, because you don't get a mix of old and new data, etc.; however
I've encountered this behavior in quite a few instances...
* no TRIM support --- obviously really useful on SSD and
virtualized disks; (although I remember there was some work done in
this respect;)
* not enough tooling --- you get only the `jfs-utils`, and that's
kind of it...
* small community --- if you have a question, you can use the
mailing list, it's quite responsive, but there aren't many
"data-points" so that you can easily find someone in a similar
situation, thus with a solution...
All in all, I've started gradually migrating my partitions on Ext4.
I stay away for Btrfs for now. And to be frank I don't quite like
Btrfs's, and ZFS's for that matter, approach of throwing together all
the layers, from the file-system, to the RAID, to the block
management, etc. I find the layered approach more appealing --- as in
if something goes wrong you can poke around --- of having completely
separated block device management (LVM), RAID (MD), and file-system.
A... and for backup file-systems, I use Ext2. Why? My take on this is:
* I don't need write or read performance; I don't mind long
fsck's; (thus any file-system could fit in here, however see below;)
* I do really need reliability and, most importantly, recovery in
case s**t...
Therefore Ext2 is a perfect match:
* it is so old, that I guess by now most bugs have been found and squashed;
* it is so old, that virtually any Linux (or Windows, FreeBSD, or
most other knows OS's) are able to at least read it;
* it is so old, that by now I bet there are countless recovery tools;
* it is so simple (compared with others), that someone could just
re-implement a reader for it, or recovery tools;
Any feedback about the Ext2 for backups? (Hope I'm not wrong on this one...)
Ciprian.
