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Old 09-17-2002, 04:04 PM  
salsbury
Confirmed User
 
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: Seattle
Posts: 1,070
softupdates is safe. safer than not using it.

basically, softupdates guarantees that the data written to your disk is exactly what it should be. it'll write the data to the disk and only after that it'll update the "metadata" to reflect that new data has been written. if the power goes out after data is written but the metadata isn't updated (a very, very quick update, btw) then that data is basically "discarded" because it's not part of any file.

without softupdates, the data is written basically sequentially, and it's possible that the data could be written half-way when the power goes out.

it also improves disk performance, to varying degrees.

it's only available for FreeBSD, btw.
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Last edited by salsbury; 09-17-2002 at 04:06 PM..
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