In my own experience the most problematic FS I ever worked with was VFAT (with floppy drives). Pulling a Floppy Disk out of the drive bay before the FileSystem is properly synced definitely will not help. Then there was USB drives and I used to have trouble with them, but in more recent years USB thumb drives have in my experience become very reliable. The point being a filesystem may fail due to hardware misbehaving rather than the kind of filesystem in use.
I use Ext4 wherever possible, older versions of GRUB may require an Ext2/3 partition in order to boot from it.
Theodore Ts'o did once give an opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_ex ... filesystem that BTRFS may be what may replace Ext4 but the hype if I could put it like that about BTRFS seems to have died down. I'm not sure I want a file system that copies on writes leaving all sorts of possibly personal data floating around on a disk.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/1 ... _from_rhel
See also "From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts'o" http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7272/
What is the most reliable filesystem format for Linux?
Mike Walsh wrote
Does that mean you haven't used ext4? I can write almost the exact same sentence saying I have used ext4 since it came out....I've used ext3 since day one of my Puppy journey, 4½ years ago. Not once has it ever let me down, or become corrupted.....and the 'fsck' stuff has always worked the way it's supposed to. To me, that represents maturity, and stability. And at the end of the day, it's a personal choice in any case; 'one man's meat is another man's poison', and all that.....
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Mike Walsh
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Oh, I've used ext4, certainly.....during my early distro-hopping days, with 'mainstream' Linux. But since using Puppy, I went with the ext3 recommendation, and I've stuck with it ever since. My Pups work fine, and everything behaves the way I want it to. Can't see the sense in changing for the sake of it.p310don wrote:Mike Walsh wrote
Does that mean you haven't used ext4? I can write almost the exact same sentence saying I have used ext4 since it came out....I've used ext3 since day one of my Puppy journey, 4½ years ago. Not once has it ever let me down, or become corrupted.....and the 'fsck' stuff has always worked the way it's supposed to. To me, that represents maturity, and stability. And at the end of the day, it's a personal choice in any case; 'one man's meat is another man's poison', and all that.....
(*shrug*)
Mike.
I have had ext2, 3 & 4 fail on me, as well as FAT and NTFS.
Finding the root cause of the failure is almost impossible. Often, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the filesystem itself that is the issue, but some other kind of error.
Just a few weeks ago I had a minor failing of my EXT4 formatted SSD. There was a power failure (and my UPS is broken) and some stuff stopped working in my Fatdog install. Other installations on the same drive worked fine, so I booted into Xenial pfix=ram and fsck'ed the drive and tried to reboot in Fatdog. No dice, re-loaded the base files from the ISO and it works 100%. The save folder was not affected.
This isn't a failing of the filesystem IMO, but a failure to cope with an improper shutdown, which all filesystems are prone to. Note that I am using Fatdog 800 Alpha, so it is prone to be buggy, so the failure may not even have been filesystem related.
Over the years I have had HDD failures on just about every filesystem type. In my experience, the hardware is more fragile than what is written on it.
Best advice whichever filesystem you choose to use, FSCK often, get a UPS to avoid power failure, and backup everything that is important.
Finding the root cause of the failure is almost impossible. Often, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the filesystem itself that is the issue, but some other kind of error.
Just a few weeks ago I had a minor failing of my EXT4 formatted SSD. There was a power failure (and my UPS is broken) and some stuff stopped working in my Fatdog install. Other installations on the same drive worked fine, so I booted into Xenial pfix=ram and fsck'ed the drive and tried to reboot in Fatdog. No dice, re-loaded the base files from the ISO and it works 100%. The save folder was not affected.
This isn't a failing of the filesystem IMO, but a failure to cope with an improper shutdown, which all filesystems are prone to. Note that I am using Fatdog 800 Alpha, so it is prone to be buggy, so the failure may not even have been filesystem related.
Over the years I have had HDD failures on just about every filesystem type. In my experience, the hardware is more fragile than what is written on it.
Best advice whichever filesystem you choose to use, FSCK often, get a UPS to avoid power failure, and backup everything that is important.
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Mike Walsh
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- Joined: Sat 28 Jun 2014, 12:42
- Location: King's Lynn, UK.
That's good advice, and stuff that I religiously stick with. All my Pups use save-files (not folders),and are set to fsck at every boot. And every Pup gets a regular backup once every month.....and I always keep the last 2 month's worth of backups, just to be on the safe side. (It's saved my bacon more than once, I know that much!)p310don wrote:Best advice whichever filesystem you choose to use, FSCK often, get a UPS to avoid power failure, and backup everything that is important.
The fsck at boot might slow Puppy's boot-times to some extent, but it's worth it for the peace of mind it gives me. And even that doesn't take long. All personal data is regularly backed up from the 3 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop drive that's permanently connected to the system, to an external 2 TB USB Seagate Expansion portable......and everything is sym-linked into each Puppy at the appropriate places.
I also have a 'common' data partition, from where I symlink stuff that all Pups use, including .config files wherever possible. It sounds complex, and initially took quite a lot of setting up, but it's paid off in the end. It doesn't matter which Puppy I decide to use for the day, I can simply carry on with whatever I'm doing. (I have davids45 to thank for putting me on to this system. It only really works because of Pup's sym-link function; it's far more powerful than folks would give it credit for!)
Works for me. I, too, had major problems with hardware under Ubuntu, my first major Linux distro; mainly the graphics. But that was to do with the way that Canonical insist on customizing their kernels; they simply decided it was time to 'drop' support for my graphics chip. Under Puppy, it still works as well as it ever did.
Mike.
I use exclusively ext2 - it is extremely reliable.
However - please remember that Linux drivers are only able to write data slowly to usb drives and in my opinion the greatest source of data failures on Puppy is likely to be incomplete (pending) writes to usb drives at the time of usb removal, shutdown, or I/O lockup.
No filesystem format guarantees data security if a usb device loses power while there are I/O writes pending.
But just for the record - i have had no data failures using ext2 since i stopped using savefiles about 5 years ago. Seems reliable to me.
"sync" is your friend.
However - please remember that Linux drivers are only able to write data slowly to usb drives and in my opinion the greatest source of data failures on Puppy is likely to be incomplete (pending) writes to usb drives at the time of usb removal, shutdown, or I/O lockup.
No filesystem format guarantees data security if a usb device loses power while there are I/O writes pending.
But just for the record - i have had no data failures using ext2 since i stopped using savefiles about 5 years ago. Seems reliable to me.
"sync" is your friend.
