[ale] recovering an ext3 drive A SOLUTION!!

[James P. Kinney III]

I would like to nominate Michael Hirsch as the ALE flag bearer for a
very needed improvement to the ext3 file system. I really do like the
idea of an automatic FIFO pipeline for disk space recovery. The security
freaks will squall so there will need to be a super delete, say 'shred'
that does not move the blocks but wipes them. This could be selectively
turned on at the time of creating the file system. RedHat will make it
the default option. Debian will ask you to verify the locations on each
file system of the inode storage file to activate it. Mandrake will ask
for a donation to upgrade it. Gentoo will need a new 300G download to
implement it. Slackware will just quietly include it with no fanfare at
all.  :)



On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 15:41, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:

> The basic rule should be, when an inode is unlinked, it and its disk blocks 
> get moved to a MRU (Most Recently Used) list.  When someone needs to 
> relink (a new syscall?) the MRU can be consulted.  To keep the engineers 
> happy, the MRU could be limited to some reasonable percentage of the file 
> system, or maybe for performance freaks, to a percentage of the unused 
> space.  Or, if the designer felt like getting fancy, some kind of decay 
> functions so that it attempts to keep all files around for an hour, but 
> after that it starts deleting files according to some rule.
> 
> I imagine this at the filesystem level, not by putting wrappers around 
> "rm".  It shouldn't matter who does the unlinking, the filesystem should 
> just keep track.
> 
> (I'm imagining this as open source, so if you want to file off this safety 
> device, you can get a filesystem that will let you shoot yourself in the 
> foot.)
> 
> If ext3 had this, everyone would have this capability and few would know 
> about it.  Someone like you who never made a mistake would never know it 
> was there.  Neither would ordinary users know--all they would know is that 
> undelete works.
> 

-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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