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How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4
LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."
Seeing how processing becomes faster and faster: in batch file processing (just an example) where tens of files get processed in a single second. It may be useful to know which files processed in what order, in which case the precision could be useful. Think of it more as a feature than a necessity though I suppose.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
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I can't wait for faster fsck. It takes something like an hour on my 500GB ext3 partition. Terabytes of storage are not that far away.
That's all fine and dandy, but will it allow me to somehow undelete/recover when I accidently type rm -Rf /hugedir -- yes I know there are other ways to delete stuff, I just find it ridiculous that all linux file systems with the exception of ext2 make no effort at all to be able to recover from such a common mistake.
Of course, rm not giving any indication at all about how many bytes and files it is about to remove doesn't help either.
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I'm an XFS fan as well. I have been using it for years. I usually have my root/boot partition as ext3 (so grub works) and all data on XFS.
XFS kills ext in terms of not losing data. I have recovered lots of data from failed drives that were XFS formatted. Not so with ext3 which tends to flake out and destroy itself when it gets bad data.
And don't even mention ReiserFS, that has always sucked. I have lost more data to Reiser than any other filesystem (ext is a close second though). Sometimes it would corrupt files just from rebooting the machine. I have never lost data on an XFS partition that wasn't due to hardware failure.
I have the following disks in my computer:
1 TB
500 GB
300 GB
When they decide to fsck at the same time, it can take 1/2 hour or longer to get to the login screen.
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It might be a win for me even today on my meager 300G MythTV media partition. I'm currently using xfs for that, but every now and then I hear about bad things on xfs with a power failure, and other times I hear that it can be physically hard on the hard drive. (excess head motion?) Of course other times I hear that xfs is the best thing since sliced bread, and is usable for ANY purpose with just a little tuning.
I transcode my Myth stuff on an ext3 partition, and occasionally get complaints about the large data size without having the right options set. But it works.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is why we have XFS. I fscked a 9TB partition is under 10 minutes. Hopefully they've done some improvements for ext4 in this area. A volume that takes days to fsck might as well just die completely.
I am not a professional linguist, but I think I can explain.
... but that's just a wild guess.
In any spoken language, different sounds are loosely associated with different ideas. As a simple example, voiceless sounds, like p, k, t, f, and s, are well suited for pointed use, as in pejoratives; and r, especially the alveolar trill variety, is associated with intimidation or primality. These associations are made either because it sounds like something else ("rrrr" sounds like an animal's growl or roar -- notice the Rs in "growl" and "roar"?) or because the sound serves a purpose (hard, clipped sounds serve well as punctuation -- notice all the hard sounds in "punctuate"?). In the latter case, combinations of sounds can invoke a wide array of ideas or feelings. Utilization of these things is key to a good punchline or to controlling semiconscious undertones of speech. I admire Dr. Seuss in particular for his mastery of sound combinations in making up suitable words to balance sing-song silliness with gravity and purpose.
Now, returning to "tebibyte" and all the other -bibytes, soft, voiced consonants like B are associated with childishness (a baby might make these sounds), silliness, bounciness, or informality. Two Bs in a row are especially so: bib, baboon, babble, bob, boob. The reason tebibyte sounds "stupid" is that it describes a technical idea using unsuitable sounds.
This being said, if you were used to using the word, you wouldn't think twice about it. You would probably complain about "flop" and "watt" in the same way if the words were new, but established use overrides the weak sound associations. The President could be instead called the Biggyloppalo and few would care, as long as the term were already established in the common vocabulary. I'd think people would move on even if a video game console were named something as ridiculous as "Wii"
As for my opinion on the matter, I'm in favor of it. The SI prefixes are already assumed to be powers of 10 in all other fields except the computer and information sciences. Tebibyte will maybe sound silly for awhile, but the problem will go away given time. And I, for one, look forward to buying futuristic data storage without feeling a little cheated.
Huh? There are undelete tools for ext2. Undelete is impossible for ext3 since the information needed to do it is gone immediately once a file is removed, whereas it will still be present in a ext2 file system until it gets overwritten as new files are created.
Ext4 has a lot of performance improvements, like extents or delayed allocation. Desktop users will notice that ext4 is much faster
That said, ext4 is unstable. It can easily eat your data. Just say NO to moving your filesystem to ext4 - for now.
btrfs -- How fast are deletes?
ext3 is both so slow and so bottlenecked that mythtv had to implement a special "slow delete" mode which gradually truncates files instead of just unlinking them. Without the "slow deletes" mode, you get hiccups in any shows that are being recorded while old shows are deleted.
On my system, deleting a 20GB file can take a minute on ext3 (and the filesystem is completely locked - all other processes are blocked), but on ntfs it is almost instantaneous.
Why not? When storage density gets so high and the drives get so cheap, why not rip all of your movies and store them on disk? I'm lazy, and don't want to get up to change the disk.
I have scripts to automate any digital conversions that I perform, so time isn't really a factor. It's easy enough to grab a stack of discs, set them by my workstation, and do the ripping while you're working on other tasks. If you have a media PC that you use to play back DVDs, you can perform the ripping there the first time that you want to watch the movie. Any time someone else wants to watch it, they can just watch the cached version.
As for your other points, it's largely a packrat mentality. There have been times when I wished that I could rent a movie, only to find that it's no longer available on DVD. Sometimes Netflix has it, sometimes they don't, but when production stops, it stops, and as copies of the movie wear out, it becomes much harder to come by. That makes purchasing them and backing them up on magnetic media more attractive, even if I may not get around to watching the films again any time soon.
Yes I have thought about setting up a media PC but then I would have to set up an NAS and then I would want to move over to GigaE. Once I did that I would want to get an IPod Touch and write a WiFi based Universal remote program for it....
It is just more productive to grab the DVD.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
XFS has that nasty 'security' feature that it will zero files that were open when the power failed. Never use XFS on hardware that has no battery backup to shutdown properly if you trip over the power cable.