A file system for generic purpose has only one primary feature: "Don't lose data. Ever." If I pop the SATA cable off my drive while writing, the filesystem shou

A file system for generic purpose has only one primary feature: "Don't lose data. Ever." If I pop the SATA cable off my drive while writing, the filesystem should later remount in 100% uncorrupted condition with whatever data it had time to write to the disk. I don't want to run fsck or use debugfs to recover from a hairy state. Backups or RAID-1 take care of physical failures of the disk. Beyond avoiding data loss, anything else is ultimately secondary. Speed is nice but near-average filesystem performance is all right for a HDD. SSD gives you more speed. Totally abysmal speed might be a reason to switch filesystems—though, I'd still take the abysmal speed if it saved me my data and the faster filesystem wouldn't. Due to this conservative approach, switching filesystems is really hard. I've been using ReiserFS since 2000 or so because it hasn't failed me once. I've had HDDs going slowly broken and lost some individual files until I cloned the old disk to a new one. But I've never had to fsck, defrag, recover, or anything my ReiserFS partitions. Never. It's getting harder and harder to switch. A conservative alternative would be ext3 but ext3 has lost me data on another computer. I have some interest in btrfs but I probably won't switch until I have to. XFS would be very interesting but not just worth the risk because ReiserFS is good enough.