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Author Topic: one more filesystem question...  (Read 1859 times)

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Offline olsen

Re: one more filesystem question...
« on: September 26, 2010, 04:11:36 PM »
Quote from: Piru;581168
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.

Personally, I'd put my money on journaling. As far as I know the SFS design follows the ideas laid out very eloquently in Dominic Giampaolo's book "Practical file system design with the Be file system".

The book, which I bought when it was still in print, was very influential for me when I rewrote the FFS from scratch. I considered adding journaling support to the FFS, but decided against it. Even with journaling support, the FFS would have been weighed down by its comparatively poor data structure design.

Still, given a choice, I would feel much more comfortable with a file system for which working recovery and repair software exists, and make backups of the data I care most about.

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.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2010, 04:37:11 PM by olsen »
 

Offline olsen

Re: one more filesystem question...
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2010, 07:33:08 PM »
Quote from: Piru;581347
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.


But doesn't this apply to all 68k file system recovery tools in general? While things are bound to be better in MorphOS land, on WinUAE or any "classic" hardware you're stuck with old, older and ancient recovery/repair tools which limit how large you can make your partitions, or select your disks.

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.

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.