From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <3430e5ccdaef3475150d5d831dff1592@hamnavoe.com>
To: 9fans@9fans.net
From: Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:03:18 +0100
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Survey: Current Fossil+venti Filesystem
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David du Colombier <0intro@gmail.com>:
> I can understand Fossil have problems and they might cause data
> corruption, but when data is archived to Venti, you can be sure it will
> stay forever.

My experience is nearly the opposite of this.  I've never lost any
active fossil data.  And I agree that once data is archived to venti,
it is safe.  But the daily archiving to venti can fail - sometimes
with "archWalk:" error messages and no dump made, but more often
silently leaving a dump with corrupted metadata in one or two
directories preventing access to anything below them in the tree.
More details in http://9fans.net/archive/2009/04/135 - I still haven't
tracked down the cause but I suspect a data race somewhere.  It's an
irritation rather than a disaster because I've always been able to
patch up the bad metadata by hand.  I quite enjoy a bit of disk
surgery now and then to keep my hand in.