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I don't want to avoid doing a fsck, but I would like to know if there is a better approach so it doesn't take ages to complete the process when it runs after a reboot 180 days later.

If you had it ran 20 days ago and then do it again, will it be faster or it does a full check all the time and it would be meaningless to do such thing ?

What would be the best practice to keep it up to date and yet minimize the time it takes to recheck each run ?

3 Answers 3

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Running fsck more often won't help.

What will help is using ext4 instead of ext3. This is an explicit design goal of the updated filesystem.

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  • I belive I am using ext3 instead of 4, but most of the files inside the server are media files used daily and the average size if from 100mb to 4gb and from the page you linked the tests were mainly made with small files would you still think the difference would be bigger lets say 50% or even more in the runtime ?
    – Prix
    Dec 10, 2010 at 5:09
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    The extents that are implemented in ext4 should speed up the fsck for large files. Dec 10, 2010 at 6:02
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Switch to XFS. Fsck scans will become instant.

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  • Well, fsck.xfs basically just returns success without doing anything. There are xfs_check and xfs_repair utilities for when you need them. Feb 10, 2011 at 9:32
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Delete all unnecessary files. fsck's time is proportional to the number of files it checks.

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  • Thanks for the recommendation but there are not files that can be deleted on the given HD.
    – Prix
    Dec 10, 2010 at 7:46

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