From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Feb 14 13:06:51 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9366616A4CE for ; Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:06:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from out003.verizon.net (out003pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.103]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4BD6C43D1D for ; Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:06:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([68.160.202.196]) by out003.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040214210650.DVRY8426.out003.verizon.net@mac.com>; Sat, 14 Feb 2004 15:06:50 -0600 Message-ID: <402E8DE6.2060602@mac.com> Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 16:06:46 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mark Hessler References: <402E8931.2020509@verizon.net> In-Reply-To: <402E8931.2020509@verizon.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out003.verizon.net from [68.160.202.196] at Sat, 14 Feb 2004 15:06:50 -0600 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Other ways to check/repair disks besides fsck? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 21:06:51 -0000 Mark Hessler wrote: > Are there any other approaches to checking/repairing disks besides fsck > after a power outage? Certainly, however it would help to know what types of problems you are concerned about reparing: physical media errors, data corruption within the filesystem (truncated files, open files with unwritten data, etc), or other kinds of problems? You can use RAID mirroring against physical data loss. You can use tripwire or other checksumming routines to verify whether file contents are intact. You can compare files against backups, and restore if needed. You can use software which performs fault-tolerance transaction processing-- for instance, databases with transaction rollback capabilities. You can mount the filesystem with -o sync to keep data+metadata more consistant at the expense of performance. You can obtain a UPS and shutdown cleanly in the event of power outage. -- -Chuck