Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

James Miller wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Day Brown wrote:
> 
> > Well, what's the advantage of ext3 anyway?
> 
> It's a semi-journalled version of ext2.  Not sure exactly what
> makes a "journaling" filesystem different, but I understand they're less
> susceptible to filesystem corruption.  
It reminds me of something drdos had for years, a file backup system,
which kept a copy of the FAT, which files were stored where, and when
you updated a file, it did not rewrite that track, but wrote the data on
entirely new tracks, and updated the pointers. Should the drive get
trashed, the additional copy of the allocation tables would let you
restore the most recent data that was still available.

With Linux, I havent see the file systems so trashed that they could not
be read. It is all still there. But what I have seen, appears to be
changes in the kernel or config such that the system no longer boots, or
if it does, is no longer setup to find 'dependancies'.

With dos, when I try an app, I usually do so from the ramdrive, "D:\"
and if it dont work like I want, no biggie, when I reboot, it's gone. No
dependancy problem. Occassionally, an app will ask me if it can insert
drivers in CONFIG.SYS and/or AUTOEXEC.BAT, and when it does so, if I let
it, it makes CONFIG.BAK & AUTOEXEC.BAK so I can restore the system to
the prior status if there is trouble. I havent seen that happen in the
distros.

BL seems to offer the happy medium, a gradually additive process, also
running from a ramdisk, such that if an app dont work, no problem. If it
locked up the system, a reboot brought me back to the original setup.
Come hell or high water, I still had the dos boot from which to launch
BL to try again, or go on as before.