SFS problem

[Thomas]

SFS is a nice file system with good features. But it's also very risky because there is not much support for it out there. It might run very stable over a long time, but *if* there is something wrong with an SFS partition, it's very difficult to get your data back, especially if you are not a programmer who wants to take the opporunity to develop a working salvage tool. There's SFSSalv and there's SFScheck, but there are enough threads in different forums which report these programs to not work correctly. In most cases, if something goes wrong with SFS, the only possibility to recover is to format the partition and to restore a backup.

So the conclusion is, if you choose to use SFS, make regular backups. Yes, this advice applies to every file system, but for SFS it is more important than for FFS. Firstly because there are many more salvage programs out there supporting FFS and secondly because FFS stores data in such a redundant manner that it's easy to recover files from a damaged partition.

The biggest mistake people make is that they confuse the lack of the need to validate with data safety. In fact data is more safe on an FFS partition than on an SFS partition.

[Thomas]

So no point in mentioning it in a comparision of performance between filesystems?

Right. MB/s is a unit for transfer speed between harddisk and computer, it is completely independent of the file system used.

File system speed is measured by checking how fast a directory with many entries can be read, how many files can be created / opened / deleted in a certain amount of time and how fast a program can seek a random position in a large file.

[Thomas]

only a fool would not back his system

Then there are a lot of fools out there (me included).

i dont see how someone could confuse lack of validation with safety.

It does not validate, therefore it is more stable, therefore it is more safe. An easy conclusion most of the fools make (me excluded).


Also you don't make a backup every hour or so. A disk fault usually happens when you work with the computer and when you work with the computer, the data which is important changes a lot. In this situation nothing can be older than the backup from yesterday.

[Thomas]

Well there is soft raid for amiga even hardware raids fail sometimes.

We are talking about software failure, not hardware failure. If the file system corrupts, both copies of the raid will contain the corrupted data. A raid only helps against hardware outages.