hjfs

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019, at 10:13 AM, Steve Simon wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> can anyone give me an opinion on hjfs,
> i am interested in how it compares to, say, cwfs.

You can use hjfs in a 1GB disk image, where 12GB is the minimum recommended for cwfs because it needs several partitions.

hjfs dump is very fast because it simply marks files copy-on-write.  cwfs copies files to another partition on dump. Not a big deal since cwfs normally dumps at 5am. hjfs doesn't have a built-in scheduler, you'd have to trigger dumps with cron if you want that. 

as far as i know, hjfs tends to fragmentation, and i don't think it has a defragmenter. cwfs dump can't fragment, and its cache can be defragmented with a dump-restore cycle.

> Also, i would like to know whether hjfs is ready for “production” use - 
> its manpage indicates it it exoerimental, is that still the case?

I've barely used hjfs, but have heard good things about it; lots of people use it. It's not like cwfs is perfect anyway; it will crash if the cache partition fills, potentially losing a day's work. its design makes it hard to determine free space in the cache. hjfs has only one partition and can correctly compute free space. I never filled my cache, I'm quite a light user of disks, but did see a corrupted file once, in 10 years use. I got it back from the dump, but didn't try to find the last good version.