Re: question about possibility of data loss in Ext2/3 file system

[Sam Vilain]

Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > Also, the scheme you mentioned is just for new file creation. What
> > will happen if I want to update an existing file? Say, I open file A,
> > seek to offset 5000, write 4096 bytes, and then close. Do you know how
> > ext2/3 handle this situation?
> If you have a power failure right after the close, the data could be
> lost.  This is true for pretty much all Unix filesystems, for
> performance reasons.  If you care about the data hitting disk, the
> application must use fsync().  

I always liked Sun's approach to this in Online Disk Suite - journal at 
the block device level rather than the FS / application level. 
Something I haven't seen from the Linux md-utils or DM.

Sam.
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