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I am building a headless embedded Linux system with a usb based flash reader attached. The flash needs to be as reliable as possible in terms of writing data recieved from an external data source so I was thinking of using the ext3 filesystem with data=journal set when mounting. I still want to be able to let the user remove it from the system and then copy the information to another flash drive as a backup so I want to keep the default vfat file system (in other words so it can be copied on both Linux and non-Linux systems) on the flash and create a ext3 file system in a file.
Is this a valid concept? Or is the fact that the ext3 file system is contained in a vfat based file completely ruin the data journaling that I want from ext3.
I know that this will work, I have tried it, but will I get the full benefit of journaling in the ext3 file system since it really is still a file in the vfat file system.
This is how I am currently creating and mounting it:
mkdir /mnt/flash1
mkdir /mnt/ext3flash
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash1
cd /mnt/flash1
dd if=/dev/zero of=fs.ex3 bs=1024 count=5120
mke2fs -j -F fs.ex3
mount -t ext3 fs.ex3 /mnt/ext3flash -o loop=/dev/loop0 data=journal
IMHO, yeah, sure... but remember, Vfat doesn't have a journal, so if your system crashes, your vfat partition might lose the file, and therefore, your ext3 file.
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