On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, James Harper wrote:
On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Andrew Worsley <amworsley@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a modest root/usr partition Finally there's nothing stopping you from just increasing the amount of time between fsck runs. If a system is running 24*7 then it probably won't need a fsck every year.
Is a routine fsck on ext* filesystems still recommended, or just done because "that's the way we've always done it"?
James
I have been using Linux now for nearly 20 years, for most of that time I have used (and still use) ext2 or ext3. During the twenty years I have never seen one of these "sceduled" fsck's produce any errors caused by a failure in the drive or the file system. Errors have been produced a small number of times (like around 2 or 3 times in the 20 year period) but they have been caused by externel influences, like for instance a failing 12V line on the power supply, this has happened to me twice, both times the problem was high internal resistance in the 12V lines filter condensors. Such a failure will of course effect all drives no matter what the file system. So in the end one could probably turn it off as has already been susgested and lose no sleep over it. I have in fact set the number of mount counts to a check to values between 70 and 140, as each ssytem is not used daily (i have three) the fsck's come around about once every 6 to 12 months. As the data stored is mostly hand entered historical engineering data plus some music (Oh also my debian repositiories) not much storage space is used so these fscks are not to bad. Oh bye the way.......... My 20th aniversary of using linux will come up around June July next year, How many people remember SLS and Ygdrasil? Lindsay