Tim (replied back about using a journalling file system): >> I do, but during testing (where I've hit the reset button and pulled out >> the power leads), I've seen warnings about not being shutdown properly >> and fsck should be done on the drive. I don't know how much I can >> ignore such warnings, and just carry on hoping for the best. Les Mikesell: > Some drives buffer data internally so even the best attempts by > the OS to sync at journal points might fail to record what it > expects. That's the point of the warning. Normally replaying > the journal will recover the filesystem to a consistent state > although of course you still lose any unflushed data from > working applications. There's two warnings. One that you ought to fsck, which often isn't noticed quick enough before you can say "yes". And I'm yet to see it make a difference if I do it or don't. Then there's the checking the journals, which it does without any say so (thankfully that doesn't seem to take forever). The only trouble I've noticed so far happened to be with a drive which I discovered had hardware faults (later). So I don't know if the trouble was due to my crashing the system, or just that the drive was knackered. >> It'd be better if there was no need to "recover", that the drive was >> only being written to if you were actually saving data to it. > Files need to be closed to be sure the applications have > flushed all outstanding data. The system writes data to > various logs all the time, so there will always be open > files in a running system. Only on systems that do logging... Can it all be turned off? Presuming a system where the owner couldn't understand a log to save their life, what's the point of them? I'm thinking of two particular uses, here: 1. I have a friend who's completely computer illiterate, but can manage to boot up and run a couple of programs. I grew really tired of Windows repairs, and anti-malware updating, so I figured something more robust is in order (has to be legal, too). 2. A display PC that people can look at information on (e.g. over an intranet), that's not always supervised, and could handle hamfisted abuse in its stride. Of course nothing will survive deliberate sabotage, but that's another matter. Other computer systems were completely capable of running without having files open in write mode (I set some old Amigas up in a high school, ages ago, with read-only system and program partitions, and they survived five or more years of student abuse completely unscathed, I don't think any Windows box, there, manages more than a few weeks). Live Linux distros manage it. It must be possible to set up a hard drive installation that doesn't *have* to write to drives all the time. Can we set up the few things that insist on writing to disk to use a RAM simulation of a drive? > The OS marks filesystems as 'clean' on the way down if all the files > are closed and it is unmounted properly. You can help the situation > by separating the filesystems - some can even be mounted read-only. I try following the old advice (separate /tmp, /usr, and /var partitions), so the most likely partitions to suffer a loss would be /tmp (which wouldn't matter) or /var (which mightn't matter). I haven't yet tried mounting anything read-only. It's one of those things I keep meaning to test, but don't get around to it. :-\ -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
