[conspire] Safe NTFS read/write driver for Linux

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com):

> Many thanks. I appreciate the time you took (and always take) to write
> and illuminate things.

No problem.

> I don't have any ext2 filesystems to carry forward; my "notebase", an
> informal database of some 20,000-25,000 technical notes, and a rolo file
> is pretty much all I carry forward from one system to the next. So I'll
> be running with ext3. Can it perform "live" fsck(8)ing a la ZFS?

No, it does not -- and that is increasingly a problem on filesystems
generally, increasingly so as filesystems get bigger and bigger, while
Winchester drive technology is not getting much faster in key areas
(esp. seek time) and error frequency per bit stored keeps rising.
Here's a truly excellent article on that by Val Henson:

http://lwn.net/Articles/190222/

> See, this bit is what caught my eye on Don's posted link of
> <http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/>:

Yes, and, if you read my link on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems 
about "ReiserFS" (and similar, such as XFS), you'll see Ted T'so's take
on that, with which I strongly concur.  Ted explains why the syndrome
cited in the blog entry you point to is, in general, unlikely to happen
on ext3 for most of the usual reasons.`

No filesystem is totally safe, including ZFS -- which is part of the
reason you need good, tested backups, regardless of what your working
storage consists of.

As a data point, my server has nothing _but_ ext3 (and ext2 where
appropriate).  It goes through fsck very, very, very rarely --
basically, almost never -- but some careful checking has found zero
detectable file lossage from cumulative error conditions.  None at all. 

(It helps that I don't entrust important server data to SATA or PATA --
but that's a wholly different flamewar.  ;->  )


> If ext3 can perform an fsck(8) at other than boot-time, that would be
> great.

Definitely doesn't at present -- though I don't personally see it as a
must-have, but rather an it-would-be-nice.

Might show up in ext4, but I have seen no such thing proposed:
http://lwn.net/Articles/190169/