What's the Damage? Measuring fsck Under XFS and Ext4 On Big Storage

An anonymous reader writes "Enterprise Storage Forum's long-awaited Linux file system Fsck testing is finally complete. Find out just how bad the Linux file system scaling problem really is."

fsck speed, want safety

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast a full fsck scan is is my last concern. What about how successful they are at recovering the filesystem?

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[h4rr4r]

If you need to fsck you should already be restoring from backups onto another machine.

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[rickb928]

More helpful advice from the Linux community. Thank you ever so much, once again right on point, timely, and effective.

Who would engineer a storage system like that?

[Anonymous Coward]

A single file system that big without checking features that file systems like ZFS or clustering file stores provide seems insane to me.

Re:linux is fail

[gweihir]

A cranky coward from the shadows is not s reliable source of information.

I have used AIX and Solaris, and I can say that a lot of stuff is easier on Linux.

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[chuckymonkey]

You're fairly wrong there, you can actually back that much data up. You just have to be willing to pay for some seriously large tape libraries and they're not cheap. We're in the process of installing a 700TB array with a 1.5PB tape library backup. You just have to do the backups using filesystem snapshots and run them pretty much constantly.

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[phorm]

If you're in a scenario where "Backups are not really an option", somebody is doing something wrong...

How long did it take you to get to 0.5PB? If you use a differential backup/sync, then you should generally only need to copy *NEW* data, and the old stuff will already be there.

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[h4rr4r]

Most people are worried more about cost then reliability.

Most people is often a category that does not do things the best way or the right way.

Re:fsck speed, want safety

[chuckymonkey]

I know I'm posting to an AC here, but I want to point something out. "Backups simply are not really an option past 20+ terabytes of storage, and simply not feasible if the storage is volatile in nature." He was claiming that it's not feasible to back up more than 20+ TB of storage when in fact it is. I was pointing out that yes you can, but it's pretty expensive.