SFS or PFS ?

[dannyp1]

I am getting ready to install a different file system in my A4000D.  I want to use either SFS or PFS and wondered which would be the best.  I have seen and read arguments for both and still haven't been able to decide.  I realize SFS is still being developed and supported but does that make it better than PFS?  Any help, comments, and opinions would be appreciated.  Thanks,     Dan :-?

[Piru]

I realize SFS is still being developed and supported but does that make it better than PFS?

IMO it doesn't.

[ChaosLord]

Do it the scientific way:

1. Your boot partition will use FFS and will be <4GB
2. Half of your other partitions will use SFS.
3. The other half will use PFS.
4. 1 year from now when 1 of your partions explodes, or files or dirs mysteriously vanish, come back and tell us which partition it was.

p.s. Make sure you have 2 small partitions for your Ibrowse cache.  1 PFS and 1 SFS.  You don't want to lose an important partition just because the cache went to the far side of wonkyland.

[Hans_]

I've been told that SFS is more reliable than PFS but I wouldn't know because I've never tried PFS.

BTW, was MuFS a proper file-system, or a patch?

Hans

[dannyp1]

I lost a partition last week using FFS.  If I'm gonna lose them anyway I might as well lose them while transferring data fast.  I guess if I really wanted to stay living in the past I could go back to OS 1.3.  I guess the fun of using my Amiga is trying to keep moving forward and not stay stuck in Neutral.  I have to believe if using SFS or PFS was an automatic ticket to ruined partitions than nobody would use them and I know that's not the case.   Dan  

[A4000_Mad]

@danny1p

I can only tell you about my recent experience with PFS3. I actually switched from FFS to PFS3 about 6 months ago. Then yesterday I had my first ever 'HD5:NDOS' partition appear :boohoo:


I nervously  used 'pfsdoctor' for the first time and to my delight it recovered everything and renamed the partition as 'FixedDisk as you can see from the screengrab :-D


A4000 Mad

[dannyp1]

a4000mad, were you happy with the performance improvement when you switched to PFS?  Was it a real noticeable improvement?  Would you recommend the PFS?  Had you tried SFS?   Thanks,   Dan  

[Flashlab]

I must say that icon from pfsdoctor really captures the function of the program!

[A4000_Mad]

dannyp1 wrote:
a4000mad, were you happy with the performance improvement when you switched to PFS?  Was it a real noticeable improvement?  Would you recommend the PFS?  Had you tried SFS?   Thanks,   Dan  

Yes I am happy with the rather noticable performance improvement. I would personally recommend PFS3 but I have not tried SFS. I switched because I was totally fed up with reports like "Volume does not have a valid bitmap" etc with FFS. More than anything it is the feeling of security that is best :-)


@ Flashlab

When you click on the icon you see this which gives hope straight away :-)

A4000 Mad

[Tenacious]

I have been using PFS2 (yes, 2) for 10 years or more.  It's much faster than FFS.

I had a problem only once with the partition where IBrowse caches files.  To fix that partion, I had to reformat that whole drive (I could have left it alone with a dead partition. Nah, not me.)  Since that time, I only cache browser files to the Ram disk.  This works great and I've never had another hint of a problem.

[avanham]

I don't have any experience with SFS but I do use PFS3.  I have never had any problem with it except that installing it is not trivial.  And finding a copy is not trivial either.  

[wurzel]

IMHexperience ...

I've had 2 A1200's, a desktop which lasted around
10 years and which I recently transferred to a Tower.

I've had FFS on my boot disk & PFS on all other disks/partitions.

I've never had an FFS go bad on me (touch wood!) but I have had a problem with PFS. However, in all cases, PFS Doctor recovered the drive & I never lost any data.

Also, PFS drives are much faster but the best feature is the recover deleted files. You can actually recover files that you deleted, up to the 990th one. Works just like another directory.

I have never tried sfs but can wholeheartedly recommend PFS.

IMHO

[AMC258]

I have been using PFS3 since it was new.  In fact, I have an early release or something because I have a PFS2 disk that has a PFS3 update on it.
I have had problems in the past, but I absolutely will not blame PFS3, as I guarantee I would have had the same problems with FFS.  I am a programmer, and I didn't start out on the Amiga, so it took me years to get up to speed and even now when I first start a project theres a good chance it will take me a couple dozen harsh crashes before I have a stable version.  Those harsh crashes always happen right after I have saved my source, and saved the new executable.  So, hard drives get scrambled, no matter which FS.
DiskSalv is faster and more reliable than PFSDoctor.  DiskSalv won't work under PFS, and PFSDoctor won't work under FFS.  PFSDoctor does work though.  You have to be careful when you use it, and, always always log everything it does!
DO NOT EVER use the 'diskvalid' program that comes with PFS3.  Always use PFSDoctor.  Unless, there is a bugfixed version that I don't have.  Diskvalid has cost me much data in the past, it tends to destroy lots more than it fixes!

The features of PFS3 like .deldir and rollover files are features I cannot live without!

I currently have PFS3 on a 100G hotswap SCSI3 drive.  PFS3 does not like to hotswap!  But, it is guaranteed not to trash such a drive (this includes drives that lose power during writes for whatever reason), unlike FFS, because when PFS3 encounters a problem, it immediately changes the drive to read only until you reboot.

My other PFS3 drive is a 50G SCSI3 RAID array.  It works flawlessly.  The only problem I have with it (and I'm sure this is the hardware's fault, not at all PFS3s) is that if I automount it, the system hangs.  So, I have to have a seperate drive to boot, which mounts the RAID drive.

[theTAO]

I've been using PFS3 since early 2001, and my opinion is mixed.  Since SFS is free and still being updated (or at least it hasn't been abandoned), if I was starting today I'd use it with no hesitations.  But PFS3 is a known quantity for me and I don't make changes lightly, so for now I continue with it.

Two technical downsides of PFS3:
1) Block sizes go no larger than 1024 bytes, which can be a problem on larger hard drives or on certain devices.
2) There is apparently a potential incompatibility with ixemul.library software.  Or at the very least, the first version of AmiGift (file sharing software) was highly-incompatible with it until the author specifically added PFS3 support in AmiGift 2.

I had no trouble with PFS3 until 2 1/2 years ago when I mistakenly reconnected an external SCSI drive inappropriately and couldn't understand why I was suddenly getting so many hard drive errors.  I ran PFSDoctor several times, and in trying to fix the problem, it deleted files everywhere!  (FFS is unique among file systems in that it offers a potential lifeline for recovering mangled or deleted files.  In worst-case scenerios, repairing other file systems generally means deleting files until everything gets back in sync.)  Finally I realized my mistake, corrected the SCSI chain, and rescued the remainder of my partitions.  Thankfully I had backups, but still lost a lot of YAM email.  (From this I wrote two very crude Arexx scripts that trawl through PFS3 partitions to rescue YAM mail files.)  I'm not blaming this on PFS3.

Since then, though, I've had two more implosions on my "Programs" PFS3 partition, and each time YAM appeared to be at the center.  I again lost tons of mail.  This latest time (October 2006), in the course of fixing the problem, PFSDoctor actually deleted my entire YAM directory!  Whatever happened even followed a soft link to my "Data" partition (PFS3 supports these) and deleted some YAM files there, too!!  I don't know if the problem is strictly with YAM 2.4p1, if it's a fragmentation bug in PFS3 (thousands of little mail files on the drive), or some lingering low-level problem with the drive from the SCSI incident.  It could also be that the YAM crash is corrupting memory used by PFS3, so they're both slightly to blame.  But it's starting to tick me off.

At the time I was running PFSDoctor once a week, to make sure these little errors weren't creeping up on me slowly, and without any warning.  PFSDoctor had given the partition a clean bill of health just 3 or 4 days prior.

Since then, I've actually switched to using my ISP's webmail.  It's definitely slower, but I've had no problems so far.  (As my incidents have been averaging roughly once a year, that doesn't really mean anything.)  When I have time, I want to backup both the "Programs" and "Data" partitions and rewrite them with a new, third partition specifically for email.  I'd also like to learn the structure of PFS3, so I might see for myself one day exactly what's going wrong, and perhaps write my own backup/recovery tool.

Conclusion: PFS3 may not be at fault, but if it is, I won't be getting help from the author.  I'd suggest SFS.

Hope that was helpful,

Todd