[Digikam-devel] I HATE EXT4

[Gilles Caulier]

Too bad.

I recommend you to take another look to reiserfs. Here i use it on all
computers in production (around 20)

and i have never lost data. never. it's very robust.

To be clear, generally around august, during holidays, all computers
still on. it's critic period because nobody still there at work, only
few guardians.

In August, a lots of storms break power supply. We have power safe for
one hour, but in few case it's not enough. Until this year, we don't
have no mechanism to shutdown computers properlly. More than on time i
can see computer stopped in live as well, with important data shared
on the network. Of course we have automatic backup, but it can be long
to restore.

Never, i can said never, i see data lost. Computer restart  and
process HDD check. Sometime, i need to switch in command line during
start-up and run manually reiser-fsck program on the right partitions.
That all.

Another experience have be done with an old laptop (now dead (:=))).
during a long time have see random crashes and dysfunctions with only
one way to restart computer : remove battery and use power supply
instead. I never lost data.

About commit and other stuff : I never use git to make local branch :
it's dangerous. I prefer to use remote repository and commit, commit
and commit. I never lost data.

I work with more than one computer, and sometime, at the same time.
It's the hell to work. use only one remote and common repository is
the safe way.

This is why, i recommend to use home development branches in KDE svn.
It simple and safe. Of course making backup from your computer can
help, but it can take time. svn ci can take 2 seconds. no more.

Just my experience (:=)))

Gilles

2009/6/19 Andi Clemens <andi.clemens at gmx.net>:
> 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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