On 9/6/23 08:23, John Holland wrote:
Janne-
Thanks for all that useful information.
others- this is a thinkpad, that's not on all the time, so a cron backup
is not that good. I actually back up manually, currently using "borg"
for that. I mostly just do email and web on it so there's probably
nothing serious lost. In a few days I will have the external disk with
the backup back here and I may see what I can find on it. My /home
partition has a lot of data on it because I built an AWS Openbsd machine
image on it. But it would be good to see whether my system is working
correctly.
Cats are fuzzy
Fire is hot
Journaling file systems are complicated
Backups are important.
That's four mostly unrelated topics. I'd argue there is more
connection between cats and journaled file systems then there is
between journaled filesystems and backups, in that both cats and
fancy file systems can be adorably cute and cause lots of data
loss (and the backups are how you recover from bad file systems
and cat mischief).
Put bluntly, I turn my OpenBSD machines off by yanking power
from them often, and I've been doing that for well over 20 years
(since OpenBSD v2.5). Sometimes accidentally (bad laptop battery,
power outage, tripping over a power cord), sometimes out of lazy
indifference and not feeling like logging in and doing it right.
Yeah, I get lots of scary looking messages about my data being
turned to hash, but you know how often I've had actual data loss
because of that? Only when I didn't save my work (which does
happen too often).
The ONLY time I remember I had an "event" that caused actual file
system corruption that wasn't easily fixed with a routine fsck
was when a SCSI controller literally fell out of the computer
while the computer was on. Yeah, ended up reformatting that one.
Pretty sure your journaled file systems would have been in
pretty much the same place, and ZFS would have shit itself on
an unrelated computer across the room in sympathy. (oh, there
was that incident with the nail gun going through the hard disk,
but I'm pretty sure no FS was gonna save that one).
You know how often your beloved "journaling file system" would
have saved my data? I can't think of one time. I'm sure someone
somewhere will swear it saved their data, but that's hard to
prove. I'm just lacking experience losing data on FFS that
could have been saved by a "better" FS. Twenty+ years of power
outages, broken hardware, testing software, tripping over power
cords and being lazy with hundreds of machines, and can't say I
ever said, "Gee, I wish I had a journaled file system, that
really would have saved me right there".
You know how often those piece of shit Linux File System of the
Month have bit me in various ways? A lot. Just spent the last
week dealing with a problem that turned out to be 100% CAUSED
by BTRFS. A problem that just wouldn't have been a thing if it
was running FFS. It was literally "features" taking down a
customer facing system, over and over.
You are trying to "fix" a non-problem by making things more
complicated. Not gonna work they way you expect.
Nick.
