Saturday, 29 June 2013

What is Journaling...?

Journaling is only used when writing to a disk and it acts as a sort of punch clock for all writes. This fixes the problem of disk corruption when things are written to the hard drive and then the computer crashes or power is lost. Without a journal the operating system would have no way to know if the file was completely written to disk.
With a journal the file is first written to the journal, punch-in, and then the journal writes the file to disk when ready. Once it has successfully written to the disk, it is removed from the journal, punch-out, and the operation is complete. If power is lost while being written to disk the file system can check the journal for all operations that have not yet been completed and remember where it left off.
The biggest downside to journaling is that it sacrifices some performance in exchange for stability. There is more overhead to write a file to disk but file systems get around this overhead by not writing the full file to the journal. Instead only the file metadata, inode, or disk location is recorded before actually being written to disk.

Done.

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