bug#43132: [GUIX SYSTEM]: Malfunction

[Mark H Weaver]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

> Raghav Gururajan <raghavgururajan@disroot.org> writes:
>
>>> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:
>>> 
>>>> I took Raghav to #btrfs last week, where with the help of gentle folks a
>>>> failing drive was established as the most likely culprit.
>>>>
>>>> In other words, Btrfs checksuming capabilities helped quickly
>>>> discovering a hardware problem which might otherwise have silently
>>>> caused non-recoverable damage to Raghav's data.
>>> 
>>> Good, thanks for following up!
>>> 
>>> Ludo’.
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> Yeah, seems like my disk is shot, but I am not sure. I have reinstalled
>> guix with ext4, instead of btrfs, as these issues started to arise after
>> migration to btrfs from ext4. So far, my system is doing well. Lets see
>> how it goes. :-)
>
> Sounds like playing with fire to me :-).
>
> Ext4 won't detect bitrot (silent corruption of your drive's data).
> You'll probably wake one day with a fsck that won't be able to recover
> some files, or worst, a completely dead drive.
>
> Your backups would also contain corrupted data (garbage in, garbage
> out!).

For what it's worth, I wholeheartedly agree with Maxim.  Btrfs did you a
great service by calling attention to this problem with your drive, and
it would be a shame to ignore it and switch back to ext4 where your data
may instead be silently corrupted.

I've been using btrfs for several years now on my x86_64 Guix system,
and it has served me well.  Previously, I used ext4, which would
silently leave some of my files empty after crashes.  I've never seen
that happen with btrfs.

       Mark