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#1 2006-10-12 11:56:39

Cotton
Member
From: Cornwall, UK
Registered: 2004-09-17
Posts: 568

File loss with JFS

2 days after transferring my Reiser3.6 LVM based Arch setup to a 160GB disk with JFS partitions, an electrical storm caused a sudden power outage.

On rebooting, all the .torrent files that Azureus had open, and the list of open tabs in Firefox (Tab Mix Plus option) had been deleted, (a total of around 100 files).

Until then I had assumed that the files would be restored, possibly out of date but still intact, courtesy of the journalling capabilities of the file system.  Obviously a flawed assumption.

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour?  Googling on the subjects suggests data loss is possible but for files not to exist anymore appears to make the choice of JFS totally unviable to anyone without a UPS, ie most home users.  It certainly doesn't inspire confidence - restoring backups is one thing, but what about files you don't know have gone?

Even when using Windows I never experienced this sort of loss, despite several reboots due to the OS crashing frequently.

None of the reviews I have read have assessed file system reliability after unplanned outages.

Are there any reliable file system alternatives?

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#2 2006-10-12 12:08:36

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,868

Re: File loss with JFS

I've had similar problems in the past when i used Suse (jfs has been their default file choice for a long time).
Even with clean shutdowns i sometimes had problems with files missing.
I think it has to do with the delay before journal entries are written to disk in JFS. This increases performance, but decreases reliablility.
I switched to ext3 and kept ext3 when i started using arch.
I've been on ext3 for over a year a now and never had  such problems anymore.

on 1 occasion a visitor stumbled over the cable, shutting down everything forcibly.
I was downloading 6 torrents in azureus at the time and they all were fine after rebooting.



Added:
Opps, my memory failed. Byte is correct, it was REISERFS that gave me those problems, not jfs.


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#3 2006-10-12 13:58:39

byte
Member
From: Düsseldorf (DE)
Registered: 2006-05-01
Posts: 2,046

Re: File loss with JFS

Lone_Wolf: The default Suse filesystem for the last 5 years or so has always been Reiser3. Just recently Novell was contemplating to change that to Ext3, maybe.

The journal functions of all filesystems , except for Ext3 (with 'data=journal') and Reiser4 (dunno), are just for metadata. The goal is to make sure the filesystem as a whole is consistent, they're making no guarantees about the actual data.
You might want to see http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#nulls (and below).

I'm using JFS for over two years now on several machines and yes, I've lost some files, but that's to be expected after encountering bad sectors and a following hard reset.


1000

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#4 2006-10-12 20:54:17

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: File loss with JFS

Also, JFS seems to use rather aggressive caching, if sync times give any indication.

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#5 2006-10-13 03:30:14

benplaut
Member
Registered: 2006-06-13
Posts: 383

Re: File loss with JFS

.

Last edited by benplaut (2021-06-25 12:40:33)

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#6 2006-10-13 11:00:01

baze
Member
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 393

Re: File loss with JFS

i had similar file losses with jfs and xfs too.
ext3 and reiserfs seem to be much more robust to me since i never had any file losses like that with either of those.

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