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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

Most of these screeds come down to a fundamental error: trusting a single filesystem with your important data.

If you trust a single filesystem with your data, you're wrong. It doesn't matter how fancy it is, how many parity blocks it has, or how many disks it's backed by: a single logical filesystem definitionally cannot be redundant. If you pretend it is, it will blow up in your face one day, and it will be nobody's fault but yours.

My backup is a drawer full of individual hard drives. Unlike any filesystem that ever has been or ever will be invented, that drawer cannot corrupt my data.

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So user's are at fault for trusting a filesystem that advertises itself as being reliable?

Even if user's should use multiple redundant filesystems (lol ok), that doesn't invalidate the criticisms in the linked forum post.

> So user's are at fault for trusting a filesystem that advertises itself as being reliable?

Yes, absolutely 100% at fault. There are many failure modes here beyond corruption: human error, electrical surges, flooding, fire. Hell, somebody could break into your house and steal the NAS!

Filesystem bugs aren't a big deal. If they are a big deal to you, it's because you're trusting a system with a single point of failure, and the consequences of that inevitable failure are not acceptable to you. Stop doing that.

If I could choose between introducing a random filesystem bug and a random wifi driver bug into the kernel on my laptop, I'd take the filesystem bug every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Reinstalling my laptop is at worst a minor inconvenience that takes me an hour, and I can always use a different filesystem until the bug is fixed.

What you are describing sounds like the usual backup strategies. Filesystem bugs that silently corrupt your data will also get synced and backed up.

> Filesystem bugs that silently corrupt your data will also get synced and backed up

This is a very easy problem to solve: don't do incremental backups. Or have N backups and rotate, which isn't as good but still gives you more time to notice. Hard drives are cheap.

Still doesn't excuse a filesystem claimed to be designed for reliability from having shoddy development practices.

Could you imagine if we treated other pieces of technology the same way backup fanatics talk about backups?

It's your fault for not having 2 extra phones on you in case your phone bricks itself at a bad time.

It's your fault for not encrypting your signal messages by hand, encryption bugs aren't a big deal, if they're a big deal to you, it's because you're trusting a system with a single point of failure, and the consequences of that inevitable failure are not acceptable to you. Stop doing that.

Your position sounds insane to me of applied to any other piece of technology

Equating a filesystem corruption with bricking a device shows you don't get it. Filesystems are ephemeral: all I have to do after a corruption is reinstall the system, and it's as good as new.

You also missed the most important part of what I said:

>> because you're trusting a system with a single point of failure, and the consequences of that inevitable failure are not acceptable to you.

I don't care if my phone fails: it's disposable. Sure, there are times it might be inconvenient, but it's not like I need it to drive my car or get into my house.

If your phone failing is some huge big horrible problem for you, yeah, you absolutely ought to carry two phones around. It's unreasonable to expect consumer grade technology to be that reliable.

Phone failing is a temporary inconvenience solved by getting a new one.

Backups failing mean 15 years of family photo memories forever lost.

Risk mitigations should reasonably scale in proportion to the cost of loss.

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