Comments on: Testing Ubuntu Jaunty and Ext4 WITHOUT Trashing Your Data

By: jonny rocket

jonny rocket — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:01:56 +0000

i am using it so far with NO data loss.
i can back up 20 gbs to an external drive so fast!

By: george

george — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:15:52 +0000

ext4’s big advantage was its speed. What’s the point in patching ext4 and making it almost as slow as ext3?

By: Scott Wegner

Scott Wegner — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:57:20 +0000

@Blab: This is clearly a bug, although one might argue that ext4 is not directly at fault. GNOME and KDE are the primary environment on desktop Linux. They handle their settings files in a way that has been consistent with ext3 and how it handles system crashes during a truncation / write. Now that the file system has been switched out from under them, users are experiencing data loss. Just because POSIX doesn’t define how it should be handled, doesn’t mean data loss is acceptable.

It’s clear that this is a bug. It’s not clear what exactly needs to be changed to fix it– whether it be a patch to the filesystem, GNOME/KDE, or some hybrid solution.

By: Blab

Blab — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:06:27 +0000

Once more, with feeling: it’s not really a bug. There is no bug here. It’s simply POSIX-compliant filesystem behavior.

By: Scott Wegner

Scott Wegner — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:09:57 +0000

Thanks for the feedback andrew. I realize that ext4 is not the default, but I believe the primary reason for testing pre-release software is to try out new and exciting features– and I think ext4 is very exciting. The same can be said about new versions of proprietary video drivers.

What it comes down to is that as long as the kernel remains unpatched, using ext4 exposes you to this data-loss bug. Ideally nobody should have valuable data not backed up on a machine that’s running pre-release software.

By: andrewsomething

andrewsomething — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:52:57 +0000

Just to be clear, ext4 is not the default file system for Jaunty, ext3 is. ext4 must be explicitly enabled by the user at installation time. So the best way to test Ubuntu Jaunty WITHOUT trashing your data is to test the default Ubuntu Jaunty install. I think that is an important point that most of the articles I’ve seen on the situation fail to mention, and I think some people are getting confused (not necessarily you).

That said, I’ve been using ext4 for awhile without issue. Most of those having problems are having those because they are experiencing hard lock ups due to proprietary video drivers. So that is something to keep in mind if you are considering using ext4.