[clug] EXT4 Reliability

[Ben Nizette]

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 20:38 +1000, Francis Whittle wrote:

> That said, I'll tend to go for ext2 for backup media, for portability.

If you get a (non-disk) failure during a backup operation at least with
ext[34] you're not likely to munge existing data, just whatever was
changing at the time and hopefully not even that.  Using ext2 you're
likely to loose data and the data you loose could be anywhere.  If
portability is an issue and data security isn't then, moral issues
aside, IMO you may as well use FAT.

The situation is somewhat different with flash media where you're likely
to loose data by the erase block regardless; no (current) fs can save
you from munging adjacent data.

ISO9660 isn't a terrible plan actually as it can perform error
correction, not just detection.  Where ext* can just loose as little
unrelated data as possible, ISO9660 can potentially recreate the missing
data completely.

	--Ben.