[clug] EXT4 Reliability [SEC=PERSONAL]

[jm]

Of course, as we're talking about archiving the question is "What will 
be readable in X years?". I'm guessing that ISO9660 will be the best bet 
as it's formalised and written down somewhere. So, assuming that the 
medium in question survives the years you should be able to read it back 
(given a suitable device). The worst case is that someone would have to 
reimplement the filesystem. Wheather you can still read the disk, 
CD/DVD, or whatever to the point were a filesystem becomes important is 
another matter. What's the weakest point in the chain:


  medium -> device -> filesystem -> file format -> human viewable



Jeff.

Roppola, Antti - BRS wrote:
> Now that's an exchange that neatly demonstrates a subtle difference and
> why I'm still using ext3.
>
> FAT32 is a well known filesystem that can be reasonably reliably be
> implemented, read & modified by a large number of operating systems,
> device drivers and appliances. It misses out on some nifty features like
> journaling. But hey it's not too bad and there's not too many bad
> drivers around.
>
> In comparison, Ext3 is being written to and read from almost entirely a
> single code base of known quality. As it's freely available, I'd be very
> surprised if anyone tried to re-implement an ext3 library from scratch.
> There's a lot of ext3 installs out there and the ext3 code base has been
> put through all sorts of circumstances over many years since 2001. There
> was a couple of file system corruption bugs early on, but it's been
> pretty quiet. All my digital photos are backed up on ext3.
>
> Ext4 looks like it makes a number of improvements for reliability and
> performance. But as the reference code base really didn't start becoming
> mainstream until 2008, I'm not going to use it for my digital photos
> just yet.
>
>
>