I can only blame my inability to express myself.
The HDs, after many years, developed bad sectors (I got the HDs used, too). At the time I was convinced this was brought on by the writing and re-writing of temp files that iBrowse caches onto a small partition. As a result, I now try never to store those files on a HD. Since they are soon obsolete anyway, I have only allowed them to gather on the ram disk since then.
The point is that PFS was not at fault. The HD was.
My only concern was I never found a way to reformat that one bad partition. After a while, that lost 100megs (out of 4 Gigs, grin) started bothering me. IIRC, the Amiga wouldn't recognize it to reformat. I had to move all data (on the other partitions) to another HD. Then the whole drive could be re-formated, repartitioned, and it then served many more years. This may have nothing to do with PFS.
To be clear, I think PFS is the fastest and most reliable file system I've used on the Amiga. If data is important, having backups is fundamental, regardless of the file system it's indexed with.