My understanding of ReiserFS is that by DEFAULT only the metadata is journaled. See http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html#crashes_handl. That is to say, when a file is written, the data that goes into the file is NOT journaled, but the data about the file IS journaled. Thus, when your power goes out, the file system should be OK (or easily fixed), but the files themselves may contain corrupt data. Seems counter intuitive, but the goal of Reiserfs is limit the time it takes to fsck after a crash. To protect data you need to protect the machine from adverse events. I believe if you want to journal data and metadata, then you'll have to modify the ReiserFS default behavior (I presume there is a man page on how to do it, but I haven't looked). Ext3 has similar configurations though I don't know the default behavior of ext3 (rtm). ReiserFS is ideal for something like an Oracle database. Where the files are fixed size and the application itself journals its own data. Or possibly a system with a HUGE number of files like a news server. Where the contents of the file aren't as important as the system not taking 4 days to come back up after a crash. In all honesty though, you need a UPS. No matter what file system you have power outages will inevitably cause some sort of data corruption. Andrew McAllister
-----Original Message----- From: Brad Bendily [mailto:brad@selu.edu] Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 8:59 AM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: Fw: [SLE] ReiserFS problem? snip This is all well and good, but the machine having the problem is brand new and the drive isn't that big. So I don't really think it's a power supply issue. It works ok, until the power goes out then reiserFS doesn't recover. It's a journaling file system and therefore should be able to survive when it is not shutdown properly. Right? snip