"brian m. carlson" wrote: :You can try setting core.fsyncObjectFiles to true. Super, that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find. :I suspect a lot of the zero-byte files and any files that end up as :all-zeros are due to your file system. The default file system on :Ubuntu is ext4, IIRC, and if that's what you're using, you can set :data=journal instead of data=ordered as a mount option. It is indeed ext4. I'll consider this option; for now I've turned off write caching as suggested by Randall, which feels like a lighter-weight approach that should give almost all of the benefit. :"Randall S. Becker" wrote: :> I would suggest turning off write-through buffering on your disk. Let writes :> complete immediately instead of being deferred to sync. Also, this does feel :> like a disk issue, so fsck or chkdsk /f (or whatever) on your disk urgently. fsck doesn't seem to be complaining, but I've set it to run every 20 mounts. What I do see is a handful of "orphaned inodes" being reclaimed on boot after every crash. :Turning off buffering and caching for your disk drive may make things :_really_ slow, but it will definitely improve data integrity. I haven't noticed a big slowdown so far; I'm rarely doing a _lot_ of writes. Thanks greatly to both of you for the suggestions. Hugo