[Tfug] Filesystem/Distro suggestions?

[t takahashi]

welcome back.

filesystem opinions are hard to get.  just kidding.   they are easy to
get, but reliability is hard to test for, so mostly the opinions you
get are anecdotal or do things like measuring performance.  look at
recovery tools also.

ext3 seems to have the best reliability reputation, but i'm skeptical.
  like many people with any fs, i have found bugs in it that had
nothing apparently to do with a power fail or a bad disk (one
destroyed a directory leaving the files intact and the other made a
nondeletable tree, but the damage was contained and a reboot fixed the
nondeletable tree).

of ext3, xfs, jfs, and rieser[34], i am leaning toward switching to
xfs, which seems nicer than ext3 in a number of ways, but i never
found a good answer on whether a power fail can lead to more than just
your open dirty files getting zeroed.  if it's just as reliable as
ext3 otherwise, it would make a great bittorrent fs.  i also don't
know whether sgi going belly up has any effect on xfs development.  i
wonder if xfs has a mode that makes it behave more like ext3 wrt dirty
files.

follow links from wikipedia pages to find some studies.  still, mostly
performance.

as for os, many here use debian, so if you use ubuntu, you will get
advice from people using something similar.


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