Apps That Rely On Ext3's Commit Interval May Lose Data In Ext4

cooper writes "Heise Open posted news about a bug report for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) which describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4 (German version): A crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded results in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files." The article mentions that similar losses can come from some other modern filesystems, too. Update: 03/11 21:30 GMT by T : Headline clarified to dispel the impression that this was a fault in Ext4.

Comments

Re:Not a bug

[dedazo]

You'll have to excuse me for chuckling a bit here, but if NTFS or the filesystem for OS X (whatever that is) had this problem and someone suggested that it's an "application problem" they'd be stoned to death.

As an application developer, the last thing I want to worry about is whether or not the fraking filesystem is going to persist my data to disk. That's why I write applications, and other people write file systems and kernels.

You can talk to me about good practices when doing I/O on any given platform, but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming the FS layer's failure to do something is due to my saving lots of little files, or lots of big ones, or anything in between. That's just stupid.