Jan does have a point about bad blocks. A couple years ago I had a relatively new disk start to go bad on random blocks. I detected it fairly quickly but did have some data loss. All the compressed archives which were hit were near total losses; most other files were at least partially recoverable. It is not a matter of your operating system writing to bad blocks. It is a matter of what happens when the blocks on which your data sit go bad underneath you. This issue has also been discussed by people working with revision control system. If you are archiving data, how do you know you if your data is still good unless you actually need it? If you do not know it is bad, you may well get rid of good copies thinking you do not need the extras... it does happen. I would be quite hesitant to go with on disk compression unless damage was limited to only the bad bits or blocks and did not propagate through the rest of the file. Perhaps if everyone used hardware RAID and the RAID automatically detected a difference due to trashed data on one disk and flagged the admin with a warning... BTW: I'm a CMU Alum, so who are you working with Jan? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
