[Cialug] external hdd, laptop, clean unmounts

[kristau]

On Jan 7, 2008 1:54 PM, Daniel A. Ramaley <daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
> If the filesystem is ext3 (or perhaps other journaling file systems)
> would setting the journal_data mount option help? See tune2fs(8) for
> more info on that option. Basically, normally only the metadata is
> journaled but with journal_data everything is journaled.

This got me to thinking. . .

Is it possible to target your journal to a different device?  If so,
you could set a location on the internal HD as the journal target for
the external HD and turn on sync and full data journaling.  Then when
you unplugged the device, the journal would not risk becoming corrupt,
and it could correct problems upon the next remount.  Not even sure if
that is possible, though.

Or, it would be neat if you could set up a local cache space that
delayed the reads/writes until the device was reconnected.  Not very
practical, probably very slow, but would possibly prevent corruption.

However, your best bet is to just unmount the drive properly every
time.  Make it a part of your undocking procedure.  I have a similar
situation with my Mac Book Pro.  An external hard drive is plugged
into my USB hub acting as a backup (via Time Machine).  I've made
unmounting the drive part of my routine, and it doesn't really take
that much longer to do.  Especially since that's the only way to
ensure your data's integrity.

-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc