That is a misunderstanding. All reasonably performing filesystems lose data if you pull the plug. The difference with XFS is that it buffers writes more aggre

That is a misunderstanding. All reasonably performing filesystems lose data if you pull the plug. The difference with XFS is that it buffers writes more aggressively than e.g. ext3, so the amount of lost data may be greater. Properly written apps fsync() any precious data anyway, so this is not an issue. The notion that XFS is unreliable probably stems from the way such lost buffered data has historically been handled. Because XFS allocates the space ahead of actually writing the data, files with unwritten data at a reset could have visible zero-filled blocks after recovery whereas ext3 would simply truncate them. In both cases the data was lost. Since a while back, unwritten extents like these are detected and trimmed back, so now XFS behaves more like most other filesystems. There are still more buffered writes floating about, of course, so the same precautions are still required.