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That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption
by sterwill 5y ago
That's one heck of an edge case! How does fsck manage to completely confuse filesystem metadata and data like this? Surely this is only if there's corruption in the (outer) filesystem, right?
- actionfromafar 5y agoNo, the meta-data is somehow distributed and fsck can pick up pieces of it. I don't think you have to encrypt the image to avoid the edge case, a compress of the image should be enough. It still sucks though.
- cout 5y agoHow do other filesystems avoid this? It seems like a hard problem in general.
- formerly_proven 5y agoMany other filesystems have one or more arrays for metadata. Sometimes these are formatted like files themselves. So a tool to recover it only has to guess at those contiguous arrays, instead of considering essentially any block metadata.
- dale_glass 5y agoI think it was the --rebuild-tree argument, which as I understand tries to fix an otherwise completely broken filesystem by searching for anything that looks like metadata and gluing it back together. I've not looked at reiserfs in many years though, so I could be mis-remembering here.
- londons_explore 5y agoSeems like something pretty fixable too... Only scan areas of the disk which aren't part of already valid filesystem structures, including the users files.
- kragen 5y agoIt's kind of the point of fsck that it scans areas of the disk which aren't part of already valid filesystem structures. It's what you run when your filesystem structure is invalid in order to recover as much as you can.
- j16sdiz 5y agoResierFS allow metadata in everywhere. That’s how they allow sharing a ext2fs and resierfs on same disk during conversion
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoAnd then the user deletes that file, and it's not a part of a file anymore, but is still stored somewhere on a disk.
- Syonyk 5y ago> That's one heck of an edge case! Yeah... especially if you tend to back up systems when you're rebuilding or replacing them by just backing up the whole disk. It's got everything, you can mount it as a loop device (which you can't do with a compressed image as someone else mentions), etc. I've got a lot of random filesystem images around, and once I trashed a fs entirely with Reiser images on Reiser, I was done with it.