Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it's something approximately like this: In the event of an error and journal replay, the f

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it's something approximately like this: In the event of an error and journal replay, the filesystem metadata can be recovered, but not necessarily the data itself. ext3 tries to keep your data intact, or at least as much of it as it can piece back together. XFS (and I think JFS), if they don't know for sure that all the data is intact, just zero the file. This is by design, on both sides. So in normal usage everything is fine; it's just a difference in error handling.