fsck

fsck

Posted Mar 20, 2007 17:02 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: fsck by bronson
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Your points have merit: it's hard to work out which changes are safe. That's why I tend to e2fsck first with -n, and review the list to see if there are a lot of changes or they look intuitively frightening. If they do, it's image-first time, so I can retry with more n answers if fsck goes wrong.

(The `all trivial' option already exists: it's what you get if you run e2fsck with -a. If e2fsck says you must run fsck manually, that means it has nontrivial fixes to make. In my experience this is rare indeed, even in the presence of repeated power failures or qemu kills while doing rm -r.)

This is yet one more place where a CoW device-mapper layer would be useful: instead of doing huge copies, you could just do the e2fsck in a CoWed temporary image (maybe mounted on a loopback filesystem somewhere :) ) and see if that worked...

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