Text editors: I want my file content to either be what it was before I pressed "save", or what it was afterwards; I don't want my file to be mangled halfway thr

Text editors: I want my file content to either be what it was before I pressed "save", or what it was afterwards; I don't want my file to be mangled halfway through. (In other words, in this case I need consistency, but not necessarily durability.) How would you do that without fsync? Databases: People generally don't like unrecoverable consistency errors just because their computer crashed during a write. Not generally possible with reordered writes. Sometimes people also need durability on top of consistency, e.g. for everything where you want to make at most one request to some server; you can do that by e.g. writing "I did the thing" to a log file, fsync'ing it, and then making your request.