I need some clarification here. Which one is easier to recover from, XFS or JFS?

I'm rebuilding my mythtv box, the filesystem is going to be used for my recorded TV partition. Ext3 is out, last time I used ext3 it was unable to handle the large files well.

So I just want people's opinion on the two. I've read various things from Googling, but I'm still not sure of the benefit of one over the other.

If you're dealing with large files, go with XFS from what I've experienced with it. Recovering from either can probably go both ways, just depends on your expertise and knowledge.

I only advise XFS if you have any means to guarantee uninterrupted power supply. It's not the most resistant fs when it comes to power outages.

I am curious in which way wasn't it handling the files well. XFS is said to handle "large" files well. But that depends on what do you mean by "large". On the XFS context, a so-called "large file" is a file in the range of terabytes, not just a file with a few gigabytes, like a movie... Most people using XFS because of that reason are simply wrong from that point of view. Not that XFS is a bad fs, but a 3 GB file is not a "large file" in which respect the XFS semantics.

Most threads of this nature will eventually turn into something confussing. By each opinion telling you how good a given fs is you will find a lot of opinions against that same fs. That goes for all imaginable fs's. My bet for now is ext3 when data integrity matters, and ext2 when it doesn't. Looking closely over btrfs and ext4, which for now are unusable for anything serious.

Both are just as easy to recover from and both are very high performance. I would recommend that if you use XFS, make sure to look into the options, there some options which are not safe, such as caching to RAM. I use JFS, mostly because it has lower CPU usage and slightly better performance than XFS.

Sorry for being accidentally vague. When I had mythtv doing several things to the filesystem (such as recording, streaming, and transcoding) at the same time, I wound up with some slight file corruption when using ext3.

Ext3 wasn't the only bottleneck, but switching to XFS helped.

By slightly better, is that anything that would be significant on a P4 1.8 Ghz (w/ 512 MB RAM)?

What? I scrounge.

I dunno, look at some benchmarks:
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html
new one:
http://tservice.net.ru/~s0mbre/old/?...em=fs_contest2
(btrfs looks promising, but is not ready for production use)

Also, don't listen to people saying to use ext2 or ext3 for this. They are inadequate for such a task, it even says so in the mythtv wiki.