ext4 and data consistency

ext4 and data consistency

Ted T'so still believes that data consistency on OS crashes (not application crashes) is the job of the applications (with fsync() etc.), not of the file system. And most applications don't do that, and those few that try it are probably not well tested against that (because that's extremely hard).

He fixed one particularly frequent cause of data loss in ext4 (involving writing a file, then renaming it across an old one), but nothing else. So people will see data loss with ext4 less frequently than before, but not as infrequently as with ext3 (or has this data loss feature been backported from ext4 to ext3 to give us fewer reasons to stick with ext3?).

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