2021-04-06 17:41 GMT-04:00, Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org>: > Indeed. But a fresh install is not critical information. If you lost > power during installation you'll want to restart over anyway. > > Its name is there for people to indeed not think that it's a magic wand > that makes everything faster. It makes it faster at the expense of not > protecting it from power loss. But here the half-installed system is > moot anyway, we do not care that the dpkg database is coherent, we'll > want to start over anyway.
It do makes sense to start over the installation if there were a power failure. 2021-04-06 17:46 GMT-04:00, Lennart Sorensen <lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca > The only time eatmydata does any harm is if the system looses power or > resets during the install since the data isn't constantly flushed to disk > to maintain a consistent state. Thanks for this clarification, I know understand better the risk. > During an install, there is nothing of > value on the system yet, so doing everything as quickly as possible and > then when everything is done, then you issue a sync command to ensure > everything is flushed to disk saves a ton of time with no risk at all > (in fact since the install takes less time, the changes of a power > interruption happening during the install is lowered). > > In no way does eatmydata make it possible for the data of the resulting > install to be corrupt. As long as the filesystem is cleanly unmounted > or flushed before you reset, you are fine. That should already happen > by the fact the install does a clean reboot at the end. > > Using it on a normal system is a different story since anything you modify > while using it could be lost in case the system is reset unexpectedly, > but since the install has no user data, there is nothing to risk. > > So when the page says to not use when you care about the data, that > is correct. But a fresh install is entirely made of stuff you don't > care about, until it is completely done, then you care. Using it for > running testsuites where everything is just temporary data also makes > sense to speed that up. If you are editing something real, don't use it. > > -- > Len Sorensen > Ok. Thanks Mr. Thibault and Mr. Sorensen. I now understand what is this proposal about. Just some little questions, I'm still in doubt: What would happen if you were installing Debian to dual-boot with another OS? What would happen if you were repartitioning the disk with some other stuff in it? ... and suddenly, your PC had a power loss.
