one more filesystem question...

[Piru]

As for my previous question - is it possible that a more advanced filesystem (either PFS3 or SFS) would be less affected/able to recover in this kind of situation (power down during writing)? I've been using PFS3 for the past year and this hasn't happened to me during that time (although I can't remember ever having copying inerrupted in this way).

PFS3 has atomic commits. Basically the filesystem will stay valid regardless when the system is powered off / crashes. Obviously you will lose the data that was being written at the time.

SFS uses journal.

FFS does not provide either.

[Piru]

FFS may be a poor choice in terms of performance, and all too easily end up in validation state, but if the chips are down you can at least scrape the data off the drive, even if you lost all information about your partition layout. Last time I looked, you were in a world of pain if PFS3 or SFS failed you under circumstances in which FFS would still allow you to sift through the embers.

PFS3 has a recovery and repair tool since ages. MorphOS has a SFS repair tool (SFSDoctor).

Even with FFS there are limited number of repair/recovery tools that support DirectSCSI/TD64/NSD or that don't freak out if you have little RAM and huge filesystem.

[Piru]

As for PFS3, I have no idea how the on-disk data structures look like and how effective the recovery tools are on the 68k platform.

The tools are for 68k (obviously they work with MorphOS as well). They've always worked for me when I've made a mess of things.

SFS may be tricky, though, as the file system was something of a work in progress until the author ceased development and handed over the source code. If I remember correctly, there was no assured compatibility between the different file system versions and platform variants. So you probably had to choose wisely when picking the file system and the recovery tool.

Yeah it indeed is unfortunate that certain parties took liberties and changed the filesystem without permission (the original agreement was for porting only). I've been told however that MorphOS SFSDoctor is able to recover OS4 SFS filesystems. Pegasos II users can be MorphOS CD as a recovery CD, others would need to plug the HDD to MorphOS capable system.