Re: Lost file-system story

[Brett Lymn <brett.lymn%baesystems.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 01:38:57PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> 
> fsck is supposed to handle *all* corruptions to the file system that can
> occur as part of normal file system operation in the kernel. It is doing
> best effort for others. It's a bug if it doesn't do the former and a
> potential missing feature for the latter.
> 

There are a lot of slips twixt cup and lip.  If you are really unlucky
you can get an outage at just the wrong time that will cause the
filesystem to be hosed so badly that fsck cannot recover it.  Sure, fsck
can run to completion but all you have is most of your FS in lost+found
which you have to be really really desperate to sort through.  I have
been working with UNIX for over 20years now and I have only seen this
happen once and it was with a commercial UNIX.

-- 
Brett Lymn
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