[mythtv-users] Is XFS the best choice?

[Damian Surr]

Hello all,

Following an Ubuntu setup tutorial, I created a 285Gb XFS volume and 
mounted it as /var/lib
After a week or so of fighting with Myth, I've been fairly happy with my 
early system over the last few days. I've had a nightmare today though.
I changed some display settings in mythfrontend then I went to watch 
live TV. The screen simply went blank. I left it for a while, tried 
changing channels, tried pressing escape, tried CTRL+ALT+DELETE, but 
nothing was helping. I was left with no choice but to reboot the machine.

That's when the problems really started. I could no longer get into X 
and the logs were giving me strange errors. I tried all I could with 
xorg.conf and even tried going back to an old back up it that was 
definitely working, but still no X, just errors.
I don't really mind all of that. My fault, I'll live with it.
I couldn't figure out what to do, so I decided to reinstall Ubuntu.
I put in the Live CD and started the install process. I intended to only 
format the / drive, but Gparted was telling me that it didn't recognise 
the format of the 3rd partition. The one that had been XFS.
I went through the install process, leaving the XFS partition alone, 
then when I was up and running with Ubuntu again, tried to see if I 
could fix the XFS drive. I didn't get anywhere with it.

I tried running xfs_repair (think that was the one I used) on the drive, 
but got an error saying that it couldn't find the first 'something', 
looking for second ................... (then just endless dots for about 
2 hours).

I'm not too happy that I've lost one of the files that was on there, but 
I'm not that bothered about that at the moment.

My question is, Is XFS a good file system to use for Mythtv (or 
anything?). I could maybe have save the files on the disk if I'd done 
something differently, but I've never used any file system that has 
failed so badly after a simple system reset. I know that resetting a 
running machine is not good, but we all have to do it sometimes. I've 
had to do it a lot over the last 15 years, and I've lost the odd file 
before, but never whole drives!

So, I'm really not complaining that I've lost data. That's my bad luck 
and no one else's fault. I'm simply asking if XFS is up to the job of 
being a dependable file system. I'd rather have slow deletes than 
situations like this. I'm holding off on reinstalling Ubuntu and Myth 
until I hear some feedback because I know I'll need to reboot in the 
future, and there'll be a power cut at some point even if I don't.

Looking forward to your thoughts,
Damian