[ale] recovering an ext3 drive A SOLUTION!!

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Monday 20 January 2003 05:03 pm, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> I would like to nominate Michael Hirsch as the ALE flag bearer for a
> very needed improvement to the ext3 file system. I really do like the
> idea of an automatic FIFO pipeline for disk space recovery.

I'd really like to do it, too, but I know nothing (yet) about the internals 
of filesystems.  Anyone want to start a project?

> The security
> freaks will squall so there will need to be a super delete, say 'shred'
> that does not move the blocks but wipes them. This could be selectively
> turned on at the time of creating the file system. RedHat will make it
> the default option. Debian will ask you to verify the locations on each
> file system of the inode storage file to activate it. Mandrake will ask
> for a donation to upgrade it. Gentoo will need a new 300G download to
> implement it. Slackware will just quietly include it with no fanfare at
> all.  :)

ROTFL.

Michael

> On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 15:41, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > The basic rule should be, when an inode is unlinked, it and its disk
> > blocks get moved to a MRU (Most Recently Used) list.  When someone
> > needs to relink (a new syscall?) the MRU can be consulted.  To keep
> > the engineers happy, the MRU could be limited to some reasonable
> > percentage of the file system, or maybe for performance freaks, to a
> > percentage of the unused space.  Or, if the designer felt like getting
> > fancy, some kind of decay functions so that it attempts to keep all
> > files around for an hour, but after that it starts deleting files
> > according to some rule.
> >
> > I imagine this at the filesystem level, not by putting wrappers around
> > "rm".  It shouldn't matter who does the unlinking, the filesystem
> > should just keep track.
> >
> > (I'm imagining this as open source, so if you want to file off this
> > safety device, you can get a filesystem that will let you shoot
> > yourself in the foot.)
> >
> > If ext3 had this, everyone would have this capability and few would
> > know about it.  Someone like you who never made a mistake would never
> > know it was there.  Neither would ordinary users know--all they would
> > know is that undelete works.

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale