ext3fs (was Re: [plug] Journalling filesystems (again :) )

[Nick Bannon]

On Sun, Dec 24, 2000 at 11:17:28PM -0800, Andrew Furey wrote:
[...]
> I know you all seem to stand by Reiserfs, but (a) I
> don't have Mandrake, and (b) the partition is already
> created and system installed, and backing up isn't
> really feasible.

Generally speaking, you _need_ backups - not of everything necessarily,
but your vital documents and perhaps your machine configuration. I know
the feeling, but try to make yourself get around to it every once in a
while...

> I was wondering if anyone's had any good/bad
> experience with ext3? IIRC when /. had an article on
> it when it first appeared, they said it's basically
> ext2 + extra (small) journalling code, and that you
> can go from ext2 to ext3 and back again, no trouble at
> all.

Yep, I use it on a couple of machines and on a 45GB HDD that I use to
shuttle things to and fro. I didn't find it noticably slower, but as
Leon said it's been sped up (instead of journalling every change to the
drive, it now by default journals metadata only). A cleanly umounted
ext3 partition can be mounted directly as ext2, otherwise you should
mount it as ext3 again and let it recover.

Current version is 0.0.5d for kernel 2.2.18, find it in people/sct/ext3
on any kernel mirror. The install is very easy - create a journal file,
protect it from accidental writing, then umount and mount with a magic
option (just the first time) - read the README.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal