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A painful data loss on my journaled HFS formatted flash drive reminded me how you shouldn't believe the crash safe promise. Especially when it crashes during a

• kqr 4y ago
  The point is not that crashes are always safe, every time. The point is that if you intentionally crash things regularly, you have to make crashes safer than if they only happen inadvertently. So more concretely, if system A crashes 1 % of the time, half of crashes might cause corruption. If system B crashes 100 % of the time, the developers of B will have to face the corruption issues and might reduce corruptions to affect only one crash in every thousand. In the end, system A has a corruption rate of 0.5 %, whereas system B has a corruption rate of only 0.1 % – despite crashing more often. So the point is changing the incentives around dealing with crashy situations in a way that ultimately results in higher stability. It's saying "It will crash anyway, so we have to deal with it. How can we force people to deal with it? We can crash it always."