John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).
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Member since:2006-07-25
I have to agree, my macbook suffered a HFS+ file system fault which FSCK and other checks could not fix, even tried booting off the disc. I had to reformat, reinstall and then restore to get it running ok. Corrupted a lot of data for no reason. The laptop hadn't been switched off without a shutdown, it just developed a fault.
ZFS is one of the best FS's However i also hightly rate NTFS, as ive used that with some heavy duty file operations with both small files and large files and even after quite a few crashes the NTFS keeps going. The only thing i would say about NTFS is that sometimes it likes to fragment itself quite badly.
Member since:2008-07-15
Another thing about NTFS is that it rarely goes belly-up but when it does it does so in a rather spectacular way. Ever had your cluster bitmap become corrupted, i.e. the section of the mft that tells the fs which space is used and which is free? When that information gets out of sync you essentially face the issue of disappearing files, because the fs is writing over files that have gotten marked as free space and updating the mft accordingly. the mft and cluster bitmap itself can be fixed rather easily, but there's no real way to undo the damage it has already done except to restore from a backup. Of course, if you run a mission-critical server, no matter what fs, and don't have a working backup then you're asking for whatever misfortune you get.
Member since:2005-07-06
I've lost 1 TB + 1.8 TB due to file system poo-poos that were caused by HFS+ and nothing else ...
I've had similar experiences - OS X and HFS+ account for a disproportionately high number of the tech support calls I get due to data loss. Most of the time, it's a thumb drive or enclosure that was unplugged/powered down without being un-mounted first - a bad idea with any OS, but I've only ever seen it result in actual data loss with OS X & HFS+.
Perversely enough, I've found that the quickest solution is usually to connect the drive to a Windows machine with the "MacDrive" software installed (commercial app that lets Windows read from HFS+ volumes), then plugging it back into the Mac. I'm not sure why, but it's worked for me 9 times out of 10.
Member since:2005-07-06
Count me on this list too. I have lost two file systems due to corruption in the last 2 years.
In both cases DiskWarrior was able to recover them. Which leaves me wondering which aspect of HFS+ I should be more pissed off about.
1) That HFS+ is a curruption monkey filesystem.
2) That apple utilities are so crappy that they can't even repair their own file system.
I have not had a Windows, Solaris, or Linux file system corrupt on me since 2002. <- and of course the utilities provided by the OS were able to fix it.
Member since:
2005-12-13
... I guess the Gods let me have those instead ...
I've lost 1 TB + 1.8 TB due to file system poo-poos that were caused by HFS+ and nothing else ...
Anyways, NEVER run HFS+ on large volumes with massive amounts of data without keeping your copy of DiskWarrior in your back pocket - just in case ...