From: Eric_Youngdale@p100.f2003.n241.z2.fidonet.org (Eric Youngdale) Subject: 386bsd, linux: which runs mo.. Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1993 20:13:00 GMT
AREA:COMP.OS.LINUX
From: eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil (Eric Youngdale)
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory
In article <1osvro$da@agate.berkeley.edu> curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis
Yarvin) writes:
>> I've had huge problems with the minix filesystem in a number of
>> recent releases, and I've seen reports of similar-looking efs
>> snafus. This isn't a SCSI problem; I have IDE.
>>
>>What were the problems?
>
>I posted a long, detailed description about a week ago; I don't
>remember the title, but it was in the same thread with someone
>named Carsten Fischer, from Germany - reporting exactly the
>same problems with SCSI and efs! A very curious bug.
>
>Do the sort of people who like to fix bugs generally read c.o.l.?
>Or should I just send a bug-report straight to Linus?
Yes, we (at least I, anyway) read these lists, but it is easy for
messages to get lost on c.o.l (I was away on vacation last week, and there were
about 400 messages that expired before I could read them. I cannot say that I
really closely examined the remaining 1000 messages either). I would suggest
that people post the messages to the appropriate mail channel in addition to
posting them to c.o.l., in order to make sure that the people who fix bugs
really see the message.
>>If you aren't backing up important data on a regular basis, you are
>>broken. Period.
>
>Shit, just back up every minute, and you won't need a filesystem
>at all!
All attempts at humor aside, it is foolish to rely upon the kernel to
maintain all of your data with all of the possible failure modes. I have seen
drive failures on a number of machines (head crashes, head amplifier failures,
etc), and you cannot expect to get all of your data back under these sorts of
circumstances. A catastrophic failure *will* happen to each and every one of
you if you use your machine long enough. As a side note, I had a head crash
last fall (about 2 weeks after I got my tape drive :-), and the drive was still
under warranty. The tape backup made restoring the data relatively painless.
-Eric