[Digikam-devel] I HATE EXT4

Andi Clemens andi.clemens at gmx.net
Fri Jun 19 12:13:17 BST 2009


Hi,

ok that's it! I will never ever touch this filesystem in my life. After having 
some trouble over the last months, today was the day I really had a fucked up 
system.
I suspend my laptop over night. As I resumed this morning, my EXT4 media 
partition was nearly empty. All my music was gone, my images, my source codes, 
everything. Some folders were still there, nearly 34GB of data was gone.
I had made a backup the evening before, so I thought I will try to restore the 
data. But it isn't working. I get IO-Errors all the time, saying that it can't 
access some specific folders on the "broken" ext4 partition.
I ran fsck, and a badsector check, too. Nothing.... all seems to be fine.
I finally deleted all files on this partition and started rsync again: IO-
Error: can't access the folder (although they were deleted).
I guess the INode-Table is broken or some other ext4 information, but I don't 
want to give it another try.

I don't trust any extX filesystem now. This is really a problem because I 
don't like reiserfs, either, only on /var for my package manager.
Oh before anyone mentions this: I used nodelalloc in fstab as well as 
barriers=0 and noatime.
But still I have this massive data loss. How is this even possible? I couldn't 
have 34GB opened so that a missing flush will fill those files with zeros. And 
why can't I access the folder anymore, even when I delete and recreate it?

It seems that ext4 doesn't like suspend to ram, because sometimes I rebooted 
my machine and it always told me that the filesystem contains errors on 
startup.
But I never had such problems with ext3 and JFS.

I hope I can restore my system and don't lose too much data now, but for me 
EXT4 is dead... Hope you guys never experience this...

I think I need some time before I can get productive again here, my 
sourcecodes are gone, too... and unfortunately I had not committed everything 
yet.

Damn it I'm f****ng angry right now. I never had such a data loss in my life, 
even Windows was more stable.
How can they say ext4 is good enough to use it productively? I read such 
comments over and over now, and today I had the same experience...

Andi






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