[ale] fsck opinions

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 17:28 -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> Per Ted Tso (Mr ext4)  you're all wrong!
> 
> 1 - put your fs on lvm
> 2 - as desired snapshot
> 3 - fsck snapshot
> 4 - if corruption alert admin
> 5 - schedule downtime 

BSD has been doing background fscking for a long time now.  It uses
something called "soft updates" instead of snapshotting to do it, but
soft updates have been part of the filesystems in that land for some
time now.  (Soft updates are an alternative to journaling for
filesystems, see the Wikipedia article at [0] for more.)

That said, the few situations where I've really needed fsck to work its
magic, the filesystem wasn't mountable at first anyway.  Takes a long
time in such an instance, but it usually takes longer to restore (though
if I think things are bad enough I'll start restoration to another drive
and let fsck go at the same time---whichever finishes first wins).

	--- Mike

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_updates