Hi All

I making video surveillance recorder from my old pc and have had problems with whole file system after some unknown hw crash (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?t=551468).

Therefore I decided to ask this question.
-what is the safest fs type? Speed does not matter - main function just to capture and store a/v files, main requirement is reliability after unexpected on/off
-what hdparm and mount options will supply best reliability? I'm newbe but read about linux fs-s and think about 1-turn off write buffering, 2-increase count of the backup superblocks

Please advise.

I moved from win to lin just half a year ago. It may be foolish but crash looked like autodefrag in windows - after some time of iactivity hdd began hard working and after this crash occured. That is last question - Is there in linux (kernel or may be distrib specific) some default automatic low level filesystem jobs like defrag in windows and if yes - is it possible to turn they off?

Sorry for my poor english.

Your problem may have been more to do with old hardware than filesystems... one makes old drives more reliable with RAID ... and this would probably have saved you some greif in your crash.

Journalling file systems are the most reliable in unexpected shutdowns - this is what they are for. So your choice of ext3 was actually sane in this regard.There is no equivalent to defrag in linux ... this is because linux doesn't need it.
http://www.salmar.com/pipermail/wftl...ch/000603.html

It sounds like you had a power out, and when the OS rebooted, it ran a file system check... discovered a great deal of bad blocks and attempted to fix them. Hence, a great deal of disk activity and corrupt data.

If power loss is the issue, I would invest in a UPS. Make sure to get one that can interact with your OS. If the machine is allowed to shutdown properly it should eliminate a lot of the problem. Other than that, look at Raid 1(much more expensive than UPS).

No, most likely. I turn on comp and just get out of it and walk around about hour. I noticed hdd activity and not right after turn on. When I set down again I saw no hdd activity and login prompt (absolutely as usual) and would print login but could not. And what after - see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=551468

May be important info. For capture and record video I setup well known program "Motion". B.o. old comp (PII-266) it can take almost whole CPU when compressing video. How ext3 behave when low CPU?

I understand and agree that UPS is the right way, but for this device UPS unwanted. Now I may upgrade and tune only software.

bd

If I am understanding you correctly you cannot make any hardware changes to the system. Is that correct? If it is, I cannot see any way to prevent what has happened from happening again.