On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Daniel Phillips wrote: > Along with this effort, could you let me know if the world actually > cares about online fsck? Now we know how to do it I think, but is it > worth the effort. Most users seem to care deeply about "things just work". Here is why ntfs-3g also took the online fsck path some time ago. NTFS support had a highly bad reputation on Linux thus the new code was written with rigid sanity checks and extensive automatic, regression testing. One of the consequences is that we're detecting way too many inconsistencies left behind by the Windows and other NTFS drivers, hardware faults, device drivers. To better utilize the non-existing developer resources, it was obvious to suggest the already existing Windows fsck (chkdsk) in such cases. Simple and safe as most people like us would think who never used Windows. However years of experience shows that depending on several factors chkdsk may start or not, may report the real problems or not, but on the other hand it may report bogus issues, it may run long or just forever, and it may even remove completely valid files. So one could perhaps even consider suggestions to run chkdsk a call to play Russian roulette. Thankfully NTFS has some level of metadata redundancy with signatures and weak "checksums" which make possible to correct some common and obvious corruptions on the fly. Similarly to ZFS, Windows Server 2008 also has self-healing NTFS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/6f883d0d-3668-4e15-b7ad-4df0f6e6805d1033.mspx?mfr=true Szaka -- NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org - 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
