Which filesystem is most secure and robust?

MikeHunt79 · 4 Mar 2008 at 16:07

I'm in the process of setting up a server running Ubuntu 7.10, and I've got 2 drives in a RAID 1 config.

Which filesystem would be the most robust? EXT3? I'm not too worried about speed, I only plan to do a nightly backup of files on windows workstations...

MikeHunt79 · 4 Mar 2008 at 16:43

I don't really encryption, I just want the data to not get corrupt due to power failure... I think I'll go for ext2 then.

MikeHunt79 · 4 Mar 2008 at 22:36

Ok, I'll go for ext3, and mount with that -o data=journal thing. Thanks.

MikeHunt79 · 5 Mar 2008 at 17:09

matja said:
ext3 is most established and the only Linux kernel filesystem with full data journaling (the others are just metadata-journaled, apart from ext4 - but that's experimental).

Mount your ext3 filesystems with -o data=journal (instead of the default data=ordered) and you will have the most reliable filesystem available on Linux.

Am I right in thinking /etc/fstab mounts all your things automatically?

Here is the line which mounts my ext3 partition:

/dev/sda2 UUID=cc9ba560-c039-49dd-b0b5-a59d301b81cc / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0

would I change it to

/dev/sda2 UUID=cc9ba560-c039-49dd-b0b5-a59d301b81cc / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,data=journal 0

?

MikeHunt79 · 5 Mar 2008 at 19:55

.walls said:
not sure you would need "defaults" as an option... also, I'm not sure that you really need to specify the UUID (no point taking it out though).

Also, if data integrity is paramount to you, maybe set it to fsck every time it's mounted (very time consuming, especially on big drives).

The machine will be left on 24/7, so I guess it would be better to make it fsck as a cron job? It's 160gb raid 1 btw.

Also, the fstab was generated by ubuntu 7.10 when it was installed, hence all the extra stuff... I think I'll just add the extra option and leave the rest as it is.