#3. Filesystems

I have some folders on my drives which contain ancient files from long ago, lots and lots of them, that I have collected over a long period of time and generally don't look at much. But I keep them, because it has definitely happened that I find something there that I absolutely need (which is the opposite of needing something you deleted), and finding stuff is easy anyway with Spotlight.

However, sometimes I want to use a harddrive for a new purpose, and the files need to be moved. These folders are huge though, and have tens of thousands of small files in them amounting to tens of gigabytes. That takes quite a while to transfer to a network drive for instance, especially over the windows file sharing protocol which is not fast (euphemism).

So why do I hate filesystems? Well, imagine copying many many gigs of spoon for hours, then at the very last moment, just when you're sitting waiting for it so you can format your drive and move on, it cancels, because 'permissions' or 'file corrupt', or just 'error'. This pisses me off SO MUCH. Not only do filesystems always bitch about random spoon and limitations, and are slow, and whatever, they also allow spoon to be corrupted and don't provide a decent way to fix it. NTFS and FAT have chkdsk, but that simply destroys any broken files. Mac OS X uses HFS+, which is better in many ways, but whenever you get an error there's no way to figure out exactly which file is broken or what's wrong, because Mac OS X is user friendly and doesn't tell you. Also, Mac OS X assumes it's so great that you never need to disk check, and provides no user friendly way of doing so. So actually, in this case, Mac OS X is what pisses me off. Very very much. User friendly is great 90% of the time (for me) but when it comes to stuff that matters it lacks, I always have to go and find out stuff myself, if that even is possible.

The only decent filesystem out there is ZFS, which apple even promised as a main filesystem for Mac OS X Leopard. What do wee have now? A read-only implementation. There is a port available, but that's not supported and buggy at times. If I want an improvement to my filesystem, I'm not going to be using an unsupported unofficial version with bugs all over it.