[Discuss] xfs repair

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 09:16:01PM -0400, Stephen Adler wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I'm preparing to building several multi terabyte file systems using
> XFS. On the order of 5-10 terabytes. I've done a bit of searching on
> the web to find out what is the customary way to check xfs file
> systems. with the other file systems, you would get a forced fsck
> ever N number of mounts thus repairing any "gunk" in the file
> system. With XFS, no fsck is performed. fsck.xfs will return passed
> and not execute. Thus one needs to run xfs_repair every now and then
> I suppose. So my question is what is the customary frequency one
> runs xfs_repair on their xfs file systems. Every 6 months? Do it via
> a cron job every week making sure you can dismount the file system
> first and then remount it when done? It's been beaten into me over
> the years I've managed linux/unix systems that fscks must be done
> with some kind of periodicity otherwise suffer from file corruption
> due to bit decay I suppose.

I suppose the real question is, why XFS? And what kind of
redundancy?

I expect that most large storage systems will be rebooted extremely
infrequently, and so some form of online fault detection and
repair will become critical.

-dsr-