Amiga has released an extensive CAM article regarding the history of the Amiga file system. The article is written by Olaf Barthel, a leading figure within the AmigaOS4 development team. Upcoming Saturday the ‘AmigaOS4 on Tour‘ events will start in Europe, but the highlight Amiga event this summmer is planned for 26th and 27th of July at the AmiWest show in California.
..fond memories of Amiga FFS corrupting itself into an unrecoverable state every 4-5 weeks. The clever thing was its ability to corrupt itself in such a way that it gave you the idea that you could save it then spent the next 4 hours attempting to do so going through lots of 3rd party recovery tools before, in a fit of last gasp desparation, getting out DiskDoctor and producing a “Lazarus”. End result? A reformat.
I never had problems with corruption, at least outside of a program crashing during a write operation.
What always bugged me, and what the article didn’t seem to cover, was the way the performance would drop as the disk was being written to. I remember archiving up my emails (with YAM, which had the great idea of having each email as a separate file). The first few would be fine, but as time went on, it would take minutes to do a batch of 5 or so, then wait again. It usually ended up being an overnight wait.
How did the alternative file systems differ? AFS and SFS apparently had significant performance benefits, but I never tried them out.
> an unrecoverable state every 4-5 weeks.
You must have been doing very naughty things then…
During the last 14 years I used Amigas, I never *had* to re-format my harddrive (OK make that 12 years as in 1989 I did not use a harddrive). The only times I did re-format my harddrive was either for creating partitions to be used with emulators, because I bought a newer faster/bigger harddrive or just for testing new 3rd party developed file systems/data compression utilities.
I don’t think FFS was all too bad for its time when it was introduced in 1990.
BTW in addition to FFS2, a native version of Smart File System (SFS) will be available for AOS4.
Just for comparison, I felt the need to re-format my PC harddrive every couple of months in the distant past and especially with early versions of Windows. Every now and then the system became buggy and untrustworthy. (Of course WinXP is less troublesome though)
95% of the time I did not have a clue what the actual cause of this was! But to be sure all the trash was removed (del *.* will not do the job), which Windows tends to collect over time, I re-formatted the harddrive before installing Windows again (and defragging the beast) and be “happy” that it felt as if I just upgraded my system for a temporary period of time again!
So far every problem I encountered with the FFS was either solved by AmigaOS itself (i.e. due to accidentially unplugging the system when transferring files) or was easily restored with free utilities from Aminet.
> > > Just for comparison, I felt the need to re-format my PC
> > > harddrive every couple of months in the distant past and
> > > especially with early versions of Windows.
> > an unrecoverable state every 4-5 weeks.
> You must have been doing very naughty things then…
To quote you
Yeah the Amiga FFS is okay. It worked good for me for years.
And then something bad happenned. Basically all my free space vanished and something went screwy so everything was readonly from then on (or some such nonsense). I remember reading the news groups and discovering the only solution was a complete reformat & install. This is about the time I gave up with the Amiga. I loved the Amiga — but I had no cdrom, no ethernet, and I wasn’t about to transfer pieces of files using 720kb floppy disks again. I once recall tranfering the doom2 wad files in 720kb pieces over floppy disks — just so I could play doom2 on my amiga — *sigh* the crazy things we do in our youth.
> To quote you
Uhuh websurfing, document typing and sometimes playing/installing some new games.
I always wait for the entire shut down procedure to finish (unless Windows ‘hanged’ for over 5 minutes during the process).
AmigaOS is much more transparent and I find it relatively easy to locate and fix any problems. For example I easily use utilities like SnoopDOS to find what utility or patch caused eventual instability. On Windows I downloaded a similar program and I was quite amazed to see all the things going on within Windows while doing absolutely nothing! (this similar utility was not of much use to me, unlike the Amiga original due to the closed nature of Windows)
“AFS and SFS apparently had significant performance benefits, but I never tried them out.”
The majority of people using the alternatives think they are wonderful and have no problems, but every so often I see a message saying that some user has lost an entire partition. There are enough of these to make me stick to FFS.
FFS was designed to work well on unreliable floppy disks, with safety at a higher priority than speed. I don’t recall ever losing any significant data from logical corruption – a corrupt partition can always be read.
The improvements made in recent years have greatly reduced the risk of drive corruption from a crash, and the great increase in the speed of IDE drives means that FFS doesn’t seem slow any more.
“And then something bad happenned. Basically all my free space vanished and something went screwy so everything was readonly from then on (or some such nonsense).”
If a partition has an invalid bitmap (because the computer has crashed between writing the file and updating the bitmap), then the only safe thing is for the file system to mark it as Read-only until all the blocks can be checked and a valid bitmap written.
“I remember reading the news groups and discovering the only solution was a complete reformat & install.”
Not normally needed. If there is a logical error in the directory structure, recovery tools can fix it. However, with the big partitions of today, it is often faster to back up the contents and reformat than to run the recovery tools.
” This is about the time I gave up with the Amiga. I loved the Amiga — but I had no cdrom, no ethernet, and I wasn’t about to transfer pieces of files using 720kb floppy disks again. ”
An Amiga works best when it has ethernet, CD-ROM, good graphics card and monitor, plenty of RAM, etc – just like any other computer.
I had been using FFS for a while before the OS3.5+ era and found it to be less than reliable. And I would from time to time end up in nasty crashing loops which are caused by the validation hitting some kind of bad sector (i don’t know how) and crashing the Amiga. When I reboot and start up again, it would start validating exactly like before until crashing again.
The only way out of it was to disable the partition.
The validating feature is clever enough as an idea, but just poorly implemented in its current incarnation. It basically works like Windows’ scandisk, but is invisible to the user and allows you to work while validating (although everything goes much slower). Hopefully FFS2 will improve on this.
The only luck I ever had with an alternative filesystem was the old AFS. With that I never had a problem until I upgraded to OS3.5. I found it to be a great feature that you could pull the plug on the harddrive at any time during saving and not loose filesystem integrity! It worked very well for me.
After OS3.5 I went back to FFS, because SFS and the follow up to AFS called PFS wouldn’t work for me.
@ Edgar
>(with YAM, which had the great idea of having each email as a separate file.
🙂 It’s for this reason that I’m still using YAM on WinUAE on my Windows LapTop… I would use WinUAE just only for this…
I’d never entrust more than 100.000 email to a program under windows (shiver…:( ) less than ever to Outlook… (the best way to loose some hundred mail if 1 file goes corrupt, maybe thanks to a virus)…
@Mike Bouma
> During the last 14 years I used Amigas, I never *had* to re-format my harddrive.
Neither to reinstall a new version of the OS (when I was still using my original Amiga) … Just when I bought a new hardisk a “copy” was enough to have it installed & running in the new one:)
@Mike Bouma
>Just for comparison, I felt the need to re-format my PC
>harddrive every couple of months in the distant past and >especially with early versions of Windows. Every now and
>then the system became buggy and untrustworthy. (Of course
>WinXP is less troublesome though)
In the last 2 years I had to reformat 2 times the HD (from outside Windows) on my Win98 LapTop, ’cause reinstalling the OS onto the previous installation, even deleting the existing installation didn’t solve the problems…
>FFS was designed to work well on unreliable floppy disks,
>with safety at a higher priority than speed. I don’t
> recall ever losing any significant data from logical
>corruption – a corrupt partition can always be read.
This reminds me years ago when my brother accidentaly clicked “format dh0” instead of formatting a floppy and I was under the shower… I managed to get there, stop the format turning all off and after a “validate” the HD survived with 3/4 of the programs… I had just to recover the other 1/4 from a Backup!:)
The majority of people using the alternatives think they are wonderful and have no problems, but every so often I see a message saying that some user has lost an entire partition. There are enough of these to make me stick to FFS.
Everyone that I know of that lost files with AFS was using a pirated cracked copy. People with legal versions didn’t have these problems.
Well, I certainly will be using SFS in the future as well, either on MorphOS or AmigaOS. I just love the ability to quickly recover deletes files from the hidden trashcan directory, plus the fact that you never have to wait for the HD to be validated. Oh, and the longer filenames, of course, but that is a moot point with FFS2, it seems. I really wish they adopt SFS, or something in that vein, as the next generation filesystem.
“I really wish they adopt SFS, or something in that vein, as the next generation filesystem.”
Apparently SFS will be provided with the OS as an alternative.
Actually one real gap in AmigaOS is a version of the Microsoft NTFS, which would be useful for reading drives formatted with that system. Fat32 drives are no problem – you can plug one into an Amiga and read all the files.