Related link with a very detailed writeup: http://danluu.com/file-consistency/ http://danluu.com/file-consistency/ (surprised no one posted it yet). TL;DR: fil

Related link with a very detailed writeup: http://danluu.com/file-consistency/ http://danluu.com/file-consistency/ (surprised no one posted it yet). TL;DR: files are hard; filesystems differ a lot; sqlite is very robust, most other software (git and mercurial including) not that much.