[GTALUG] Interesting essay on filesystem consistency

[Alvin Starr]

Close to 20 years ago I moved from mbox to cyrus and have never looked back.

I did learn that the Ext file systems had some issues bit big 
directories and for a lot of years I used reiserfs.
It seems that recent Ext filesystems have the big directory problem fixed.

In those early years I had Ext give me more than a few bad days.



On 12/14/2015 01:36 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 10:48:09PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
>> http://danluu.com/file-consistency/
>>
>> I found it interesting that ReiserFS was pointed at as having amongst the
>> best handling of errors, passing them back sensibly to applications.
> It better have good error handling given how many insane errors it often
> generates (in my experience).  It is not a place I want to store my
> data anymore.
>
>> Also interesting was that they pointed at using SQLite as a way of mostly
>> hiding applications from worrying about such troubles.
>>
>> Also entertaining was the notion of "MBox considered harmful"; makes me
>> like MH and Maildir all the better, as they have the merit of storing a
>> message per file, so that there's fewer concurrency issues surrounding
>> re-opening files and rewriting them.  (Possibly I'm wrong, and the problem
>> just shifts to directory metadata access...)
> Well deleting a message requires deleting a file, not rewriting the
> entire mbox after that message, so Maildir is a good idea.
>


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