@3vi1,

At least for files which are constantly being replaced, the patches
which are queued to be merged into mainline at the next merge window
should cause ext4 to work no worse than ext3, and that seems to be most
people were complaining about on this bug.   Most editors, like vi and
emacs, are actually pretty good about calling fsync() when you save a
file.   I just checked OpenOffice, and it uses fsync() when it is done
saving a file as well.  So that tends to take care of most of the other
common cases.  (Things like object files in a build directly generally
aren't considered precious since you can always do a "make clean; make"
to generate them.

Personally, I test bleeding edge kernels all the time, and I've never
had a problem simply because I usually know before I'm about to do
something that might be dangerous, and so I just use the "sync" command
in a terminal beforehand.

The other thing that probably helps is that I also avoid hardware that
requires proprietary video drivers like the plague.   Why settle for
machines that crash all the time?   There are enough hardware options
out there that don't require proprietary video drivers, I don't
understand why folks would even consider buying cards that need binary-
only video drivers.   There's a reason why kernel developers refuse to
debug kernels that have been tainted by binary drivers; at least a few
years ago, Nvidia drivers had enough wild pointer errors that would
randomly corrupt kernel memory and cause hard-to-debug kernel oops and
panics in completely unrelated subsystems that they were pretty much
single-handedly responsible for the kernel "taint" flag infrastructure;
kernel developers were wasting too much time trying to debug buggy
binary-only video-drivers.

Finally, if you are really paranoid, you can mount your filesystem with
the "sync" option; this works for all filesystems, and will force writes
out to disk as soon as they are issued --- you can also toggle this on
and off by remounting the filesystem.  i.e., "mount -o remount,sync
/mntpt" and "mount -o remount,async /mntpt".     This will work for any
filesystem, as "sync" and "async" are generic mount option flags.

-- 
Ext4 data loss
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/317781
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