Other ways to check/repair disks besides fsck?

[Chuck Swiger]

Mark Hessler wrote:
> Are there any other approaches to checking/repairing disks besides fsck 
> after a power outage? 

Certainly, however it would help to know what types of problems you are 
concerned about reparing: physical media errors, data corruption within the 
filesystem (truncated files, open files with unwritten data, etc), or other 
kinds of problems?

You can use RAID mirroring against physical data loss.

You can use tripwire or other checksumming routines to verify whether file 
contents are intact.

You can compare files against backups, and restore if needed.

You can use software which performs fault-tolerance transaction processing-- 
for instance, databases with transaction rollback capabilities.

You can mount the filesystem with -o sync to keep data+metadata more 
consistant at the expense of performance.

You can obtain a UPS and shutdown cleanly in the event of power outage.

-- 
-Chuck