[mythtv-users] Is there a distributed filesystem available?

[Steve Hodge]

On 6/20/06, Indulis Bernsteins <indulis.b at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> the definition of a filesystem is that it has one logical set of information
> in it, so no there is no such file system that just loses some of its data.

The definition of a filesystem is a system that stores files. There is
no requirement for it to behave as a single logical unit that works or
fails in total. With most filesystems you can recover some files after
corruption, we're just talking about the same thing spanned across
disks.

> I dont understand why you wouldn't want to run mirroring/RAID1.  Disks are
> pretty cheap now.

It's still going to cost more, be noiser, have higher power
consumption, and require more cooling. Avoiding extra disks may not be
a priority for you, but don't assume it's not for others.

> The only alternative is to have a change to the mythtv code where it puts
> one file on one filesystem and the next recording in a file on another.

I think that's in development.

> Personally, I don't really see a lot of advantage to this.  IMHO if you're
> serious about availability, use RAID (software or hardware), if not then
> just accept that when a disk dies you'll lose all the data in any LVM volume
> group that has part of its data on that disk.

The point is that RAID is overkill for a bunch of TV recordings. You
don't need five nines reliability. That's why almost nobody backs up
their recording partition. But doesn't mean that some protection from
hardware failure wouldn't be nice.

Steve