[ale] Get paid for undelete on ext3 help

Joseph A. Knapka jknapka at earthlink.net
Thu Aug 22 20:26:32 EDT 2002


"James P. Kinney III" wrote:
> 

[scissors of brevity]

> So, at this point, I don't recommend ANY journaling file systems for
> anyone without a good, up and running backup system. In unix, rm is a
> command, not a request!

Indeed. I must say, I find the entire notion of an "undelete"
function somewhat perverse. Why would one expect one's explicit
order to *remove some files and free the occupied disk space*
to be implicitly ignored by the system? Even on systems where
file undeletion "works", like Windows et al, it only works
if you get lucky and the space in question hasn't been
reused for anything. If you *want* your "rm" command to
be symbolic, then alias it to something that moves the
files somewhere instead. Possibly that should be the
default on desktop distros (but then you'd have millions
of, "I just deleted ten gigabytes of crap off of my
disk, but I still have no free disk space, what's up?"
helpesk calls... if it ain't one thing it's another).
I expect "delete, but don't *really* delete" has
fragmentation and thus performance consequences, as
well.

BTW, while the paragraph above may be a bit forceful, it's
not intended as any kind of flame, just a strongly-held
opinion.

Cheers,

-- Joe
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

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