From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 30 8:35:53 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pat.genie.syncordia.net (pat.genie.syncordia.net [193.113.200.222]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id EDBF037B416 for ; Wed, 30 Jan 2002 08:35:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from pat.genie.syncordia.net (193.113.200.222) by pat.genie.syncordia.net; 30 Jan 2002 16:35:34 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 16:35:34 +0000 From: tim.borgeaud@genie.co.uk Message-Id: <1012408534.webexpressdV3.1.f@mail.u.genie.co.uk> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Softupdates ( why not to use on / fs ) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have little knowledge of filesystems but as I understand it, although softupdates is not synchronous, it tries to make sure that you have a valid filesystem on disk at any point. An asynchronous system is at greater risk of corruption when there are crashes etc, because the file system on disk alone is often not valid, much of the changes still being cached in memory. Softupdates should be nearly as safe as a plain synchronous system. Someone with a better understanding should clarify this. Data corruption and loss should only occur when you are in the middle of writing (changing the file system). This has certainly happened to me before softupdates. Softupdates should actually make this less likely as the system is written to less frequently. The only safety issue I have heard is that a softupdates failure can lead to pretty drastic damage. Again someone who knows better should clarify this. Tim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message