David Masover wrote:
Christopher Chan wrote:
Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
The only possibility one could still lose mail when having proper
hardware failsafes would be if the kernel had a bug and crashed (and
that's
so bad, it doesn't really warrant any working around it).
Ever used DOS with smartdrv? smartdrv gave a performance boost by
storing recently touched files in memory and writing to disk later. This
is called a disk cache. You would be explicitly told to NOT just turn
off the computer each time smartdrv was loaded. You had to first clear
the cache and then you could power off the box otherwise you would lose
any data sitting in the cache that had not been flushed.
Which means that, if you have proper hardware failsafes, you will only
lose data if you don't properly clear the cache before shutting down
(which Linux shutdown scripts will do for you), or if there's a crash.
I'm sure many people used smartdrv without problems, and appreciated the
performance boost.
Which is why data important software use fsync/fsyncdata to minimize
data loss from crashes.
Moral of the story: Data loss is a Bad Thing. Those who would give up
essential data safety for a little temporary performance deserve
neither. (With apologies to Ben Franklin.)
And while reading this, it's important to keep in mind that I do not
practice what I've just preached. I'm addicted to the performance, and I
could probably argue the other side just as effectively. Besides, at
least on my experimental/gaming rig, I like a little adrenaline in my
admin work!
Try arguing why you lost thousands of mails when the box crashed and
justifying it.
