Journaling - any benefits for a MacBook?
in [Mac Systems]
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From: Doug Anderson on 31 May 2010 00:01 John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> writes: > RE: > "For the rest of us "hobby" users, I question whether the > few percent "penalty" of running journaling is worth it, > when most of us can use all the speed we can muster, > instead of wasting our speed on journaling, which > may or may not save a very few recent files > once every 3 years." > > Agreed. > > I have never used journaling, ever, across multiple Macs, drives, and > partitions. > > Seems to work just fine. It works absolutely fine, unless you need to recover from a crash where data was lost. Just like not backing up also "works fine" unless your hard drive dies, or you accidentally delete a file you need. So, if you _know_ your hard drive will never die, your computer will never get stolen, you'll never accidentally delete a file, then don't back up. And if you _know_ you'll never have a hard crash that corrupts your file system (or if you have no data worth protecting), then don't run journaling. Or, possibly, if you believe the performance hit of journaling is so bad that you want to take the risk of losing data in a hard crash, that could be another reason not to run journaling.
From: Mark Conrad on 31 May 2010 02:13 Thanks for the detailed decription of journaling. Personally, up to now I had always left journaling turned on, but since I decided to be an "early adopter" of Apple's 512 GB SSD, I decided to play it safe and eliminate the safety angle and recovery angle of the journal. Main reason is that I do not want to use up any more write cycles to the SSD than I absolutely had to, because present SSDs have a finite number of write cycles, then they are only good for doorstops. Hopefully, the SSD technology will improve in this respect, in the future, so fast SSD will last almost as long as regular hard drives. The "normal" Mac user can no doubt get a SSD to last long enough for it to be a good investment, even now. No waiting for a disk to spin around, bang, the data is there almost instantly, ready to grab. Apple would never have offered it as an option, if they figured that everyone would need the $1,300 SSD replaced after only a years use, they would go broke replacing SSD's. That said, it just does not make sense to me to deliberately rack up thousands and thousands of write cycles with something like journaling, just for the sake of a little added security on a few _recent_ files, every 3 years. Dunno about others here, but I save my files to disk periodically as a habit, so in my case I just lose a few minutes work. A MacBook does not need to worry about power outages, for obvious reasons. > A power failure or system crash on a file system without > journalling, is going to run fsck (File System Check utility) > on the file system before mounting that file system. > > Besides taking a long time, it is going to concentrate > high disk activity such that your disk is > going to be running hot for hours... If there was any chance of that happening to me, I would merely hold down the power button to power-off the Mac. I am not going to let my poor little Mac fry. The file system is already screwed up, right? I have lost maybe 5 minutes of work, right? I have a full backup, right? Heck, I even have partial backups of my recent work, right? Say right, please. ;-) ;-) ;-) This nasty event only happens once every 3 years. (you don't need to say "right" to that one) So I spend just under an hour restoring my OS X and Windows-7 partitions, and I am good for another 3-years. (without journaling, of course) In the rare instance when it is a hardware fault, the restore operation would obviously fail, in which case I would try to boot off an external drive. If that worked, obviously the internal hard drive is dead. If booting off the ext hard drive fails, it goes in for repair, a new motherboard possibly, or whatever. What it boils down to is choice, some of us prefer journaling, some do not. Thank goodness we have the choice, in this instance. Everyone is happy :) Mark-
From: Mark Conrad on 31 May 2010 02:18 In article <4c032a6e$0$22856$2c56edd9(a)usenetrocket.com>, John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote: > I have never used journaling, ever, across multiple Macs, > drives, and partitions. I am not certain, but I think a few things will not work unless journaling is turned on initially. Boot Camp? Fortunately, journaling can usually be turned off later, from Disk Utility. Mark-
From: dorayme on 31 May 2010 02:32 In article <sehix-49DCFD.20542330052010(a)5ad64b5e.bb.sky.com>, Steve Hix <sehix(a)NOSPAMmac.comINVALID> wrote: > In article <4c032a6e$0$22856$2c56edd9(a)usenetrocket.com>, > John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote: > > > RE: > > "For the rest of us "hobby" users, I question whether the > > few percent "penalty" of running journaling is worth it, > > when most of us can use all the speed we can muster, > > instead of wasting our speed on journaling, which > > may or may not save a very few recent files > > once every 3 years." > > > > Agreed. > > > > I have never used journaling, ever, across multiple Macs, > > drives, and partitions. > > > > Seems to work just fine. > > And I use it on all my Mac systems (and my wife's, etc.) > > Never had a problem, never noticed any performance issues. > > Then again, I spent more than 20 years working around Solaris and SunOS > systems, and I'm used to it. I too use journaling. I have spent no time working on Solaris, SunOS or any other fancy duper big time reputation enhancing things, I work in dirty conditions helping the poor and the lame and the meek get by until the time comes at The Gates of St Peter's when they shall be first and the sun and solaris bigshots will be last. Blessed be the journalers and the non journalers. Can we please all take a minute to kneel and pray. -- dorayme
From: dorayme on 31 May 2010 02:33
In article <9863241zz9.fsf(a)ethel.the.log>, Doug Anderson <ethelthelogremovethis(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It works absolutely fine, unless you need to recover from a crash > where data was lost. Keep repeating this. It is how these threads in Mac groups grow, after all. -- dorayme |