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Comment by quesera

10 years ago

This is an interesting article but the examples given are seriously dated:

Mail servers and clients (MTAs and MUAs) have been using Maildir format to escape this problem since 1996.

Filesystems have evolved. ZFS has been available for ten years.

If you take your data seriously, you do need to make informed choices. But this article isn't targeted at people who won't know about Maildir and ZFS.

The section about relative data loss failures between various applications is great. Again, careful choices: SQLite and Postgres.

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quesera

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_pmf_  10 years ago

Wasn't part of the need for Maildir indexability rather than reliability?

  • quesera  10 years ago

    It provides both. mbox was a known evil 20 years ago, so it's a bad example for the article.

    The qmail spec describes queuing and delivery in a filesystem-safe manner.

naasking  10 years ago

> Filesystems have evolved. ZFS has been available for ten years.

Perhaps you should examine the section discussing the various problems with file systems. ZFS is hardly immune from these problems.

Spooky23  10 years ago

The article is a troll with some good information.

I've been a heavy mail user for years... Never encountered data loss due to file system problem, and honestly I can't think of a time in the last decade where anyone I'm acquainted with has. (And I ran a very large mail system for a long time)

Hell, I've been using OSX predominately for years now, and that garbage file system hasn't eaten any data yet!

There are problems, even fundamental problems, but if someone is literally unable to use any mail client, you need to look at the user before the file system.

  • cmurf  10 years ago

    Where I think you're seeing "that garbage file system" not eating your data has a lot to do with no crashes or power losses. It has evolved a good deal since HFS and even HFS+ days, no one uses either of those anymore. It's all HFSJ, with a scant number using HFSX.

    20 years ago Mac OS crashed often, and had a file system not designed to account for that. OS X even shipped with non-journaled HFS+. It was only into the 3rd major release of OS X that journaling appeared. Data corruptions, I feel, dropped massively, because the OS didn't crash nearly as often, but did still crash. In the last 4-5 years I'd say I get maybe one or two kernel panics per year on OS X, which is a lot less than I get on Linux desktops. But even still on Linux desktops, I can't say when I've seen file system corruption not attributable to pre-existing hardware issues.