Andrew Worsley wrote:
Is there any tool that will unmount a filesystem and fsck say once every 2-3 months to avoid having the massive slow fsck on the reboot every 6-12 months?
Doing that only shifts the costly(timewise) fsck to a time of your choosing, but to do it(fsck) more often achieves no benefit at all. Ext3/4 filesystems do not need defragmenting like FAT32 and friends, the fsck is only a consistency check, as incorrect shutdown procedures can cause filesystem inconsistencies.
If not I am thinking of a cron job that tries to umount the filesystem in the middle of the night, run a basic fsck and if all goes well remounts it mailing the results to root.
I have a modest root/usr partitions but the larger other partitions only used for recording TV take 30+ minutes to do the occasional fsck and that always is demanded sometimes very inconveniently on a reboot.
cheers Robert