If power off suddenly, which file system will be safer? Ext3 or reiserfs?
Somebody told me that reiserfs will probably lose files, and ext3 is much safer. Is that true? All my patitions are formated as reiserfs, are they in dangerous?

Both ext3 and reiserfs are so-called journalling file systems. That is, if the system crashes/fails/whatever, they are designed to keep the filesystem in a consistent state.

Issues of data loss with a sudden power loss are somewhat different. Anything that has not been written to the disk will be lost, plain and simple. You could use techniques like synchronous mounting, but you would take a huge performance hit.

I guess the question is: what are you trying to protect against?

Short of a hardware failure, I'm not aware of any case where a sudden power off lost data that wasn't being worked on in the few minutes (or even seconds) immediately before the crash.

In other words, if you save a file on Monday and your computer crashes on Tuesday, you should be fine.

/me has been using Reiser exclusively since SuSEs kernel 2.2.19 and never had any data-loss :)

Note also that reiserfs is the default in Slack. If Patrick makes it his preferred choice, heck, I wouldn't argue with him.

In my own experience, I use reiser on all my systems, and also haven't had any data loss problems -- J.W.

As anecdotal evidence, I use ext3 on my desktop and reiserfs on most of my other machines. You might ask yourself why I use ext3 in that one case. Really, there's no reason. Were I doing it now, I would probably use reiserfs. But I've had that one up for about a year, and am not going to reinstall to switch filesystems.

There's also the IBM-developed XFS in the journaling filesystem arena. Some claim it has better performance. It's less supported by livecds and default distro kernels, from what I hear.

While I know Patrick does know what he is doing and I do regard him well, I have to wonder if that being the default makes it better, or makes it more suitable for systems targeted by slack.

having everything formatted to ext3 makes things easier for LILO...

Eh?

Can you please elaborate on that?



Cheers,
Tink

i would be also interested to know why...
some time ago i found an interesting, and relative simple, benchmarking test with some filesystems...
for those interested: click here.
regards,
slackie1000

Both filesystems are journaling so they offer some protection.
With that said, i must say that no one is better than a backup.

It is said that reiserfs supports only metadata journaling (i don't know about new versions) while ext3 supports data
journaling too (if mounted with data=journal option).

To explain a lit more, reiserfs says "i am going to write to file foo","i wrote to file foo" while ext3 says "i am going to write
'bar' to file foo","i wrote 'bar' to file foo"
So, in a case of failure ext3 offers better protection than reiserfs but this is a very small possibility.

Both filesystems are very good.
ext3 has the advantage that can be mounted as ext2 (without journaling of course) so you can mount it from almost every box.
reiserfs has the advantage that is very quick with small files and also it saves much space for small files.

Choose whatever you like and you will be happy with it.
As i mentioned before no journaling fs can replace a backup.

ext3 with data journaling is significantly slower than with only metadata journaling. Just a thought.

If you are worried about data loss on power failure, the safest way to go is always a UPS with a serial port output. You can set up your machine to shut down cleanly in response to UPS power failure events, and the battery backup will give you enough time to do that, without you having to sacrifice filesystem efficiency to protect against such things. They'll also protect against minor power changes too, like surges and flickering power.

These ones all have USB/RS-232 interfaces. That Belkin one, the third one down, runs about $100 and looks pretty adequate just reading the specs. There's also some cheaper ones and some more expensive ones.

LILO can run the kernel from a reiserfs partition. Yes, I know I can create a /boot partition, but I don't like it unless I have more than one distro on the machine.

LILO can also run the kernel from an ext3 partition. And XFS, I believe.

Same holds true for grub.

Both statements are true - but I fail to see how they back
your theory that lilo has a better life if you use ext3?



Cheers,
Tink