Adam Levin writes: > This is a very interesting discussion for me, and probably warrants > some more research and testing. I readily admit that I've always > worked under the operating assumption that pulling the plug *could* > lead to corruption, even after "upgrading" from ufs to xfs those many > years ago. It certainly deserves a second look as to whether this > quiescing stuff is necessary. Many in the industry, including the > backup vendors, seem to think it's required.
I think this is just a holdover from the days when the early UNIX filesystem implementations were much more fragile and unclean shutdowns frequently led to filesystem damage. Since then filesystem implementations have improved a great deal and techniques like BSD soft updates or journaling make major corruption after an unclean shutdown much less likely (although some data loss is always a possibility, and the possibility of corruption can't be entirely eliminated). Database systems still often seem to have this problem, though, and doing filesystem-level backups of systems with running databases will often get inconsistent database state. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
