OS X file system corruption
===========================

Thursday 26 March 2009 16:34

After a crash of OS X on my iBook G4 some
applications showed unexpected behaviour: Mail.app
lost it's preferences, BOINC Manager refused to
start running and Vim showed an error message when
starting. When I then read about problems with
linux file systems, I realized after all these
years most file systems still can't be trusted to
prevent data corruption in such a situation. Which
means you don't just end up with a working version
of the file as it was just before the crash, or no
file at all, but a broken version with random
binary data in it. Looking at the cause for Vim's
error message I found out there was just binary
junk at the end of the .viminfo file. And BOINC
Manager's preferences file was corrupted in the
same way. I suspect Mail.app's preferences had the
same issue, since most likely those files were open
or written to shortly before the crash. And all
those files are in my FileVaulted home folder, so
that probably had something to do with it.
Disappointed again by OS X, I would replace it with
Nexenta with ZFS if it was available for PPC... by
Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2009/03/26/os-x-file-system-corruption/