Please help! USB pen drive is fscked... any advice for recovery?

[Feathers McGraw]

EXT4 for both, the one that broke and the one that slowed down too. To be fair, I doubt in your use case the drive has seen quite so many write cycles!

[oshunluvr]

I would not use ext4 with any small/slow device. Far faster to use ext2 and DO YOUR BACKUPS You can use ext4, but then you need to turn off journaling and a few other features. Simpler and virtually same results to use ext2. Journaling and atime stamps really slow down ext4.

[oshunluvr]

FYI: "normal" life for these devices is like 100,000 cycles.

[Feathers McGraw]

OK OK, I've learned my lesson

That's interesting, I've never really considered EXT2, only 3 and 4. I guess because I was researching about HDDs. The right tool for the right job, I guess!

[Feathers McGraw]

FYI: "normal" life for these devices is like 100,000 cycles.

Hmm yeah but if each log file entry is a write that racks up pretty quickly on a server!

Edit: sorry, autocorrect

[oshunluvr]

There's no reason at all anymore to use ext3 - too slow. Like I said - you can tweak ext4 to make it slightly faster than ext2, but it's a bit of effort and not enough gain that you'll notice the difference over ext2 in real world use. My systems still use ext2 for /boot when it's required. I used to really play around with formats: ext2 for boot, reiserfs on top of RAID0 for root, xfs for large file storage, etc. Now with hard drive/SSD/SATA speeds it's not worth the effort. I just plop everything into btrfs and be done with it.

100,000 "cycles" is supposedly about 5-10 years in normal use. I actually did some remembering and the thumb drive I'm using at work was new in 2006. It only gets 40mb or so of data on/off once a day. If you figure 270 work days at 40MB on a 4GB device thats something like 90 GB of data transfer (if my math is close ) so thats like only a few hundred cycles. I must have dropped a 1024 somewhere.

[SteveRiley]

Going for an expandable high-quality server is a good idea. For all practical purposes, your email and your blog are production services -- you rely on email daily, and you are building a following with your blog. While the Pi is certainly a cool little gadget, it does not qualify as a production server.

I'd advise against USB thumb drives for primary storage for the same reason. While they may be rated for "100,000 cycles," I wouldn't trust them for constant 24/7/365 use. I chatted with a couple storage experts at work and they said the same thing. All-day, every-day access -- whether reads or writes -- is not what these devices are intended for. Furthermore, you will often see speed variations on a single device. The first few KB or MB are built from more expensive faster NAND cells, to make them appear "fast" in quick tests, while the remainder is built from cheaper slower cells. This could explain the awful slowness you mentioned earlier.

Do yourself a favor: use production gear for production servers. Relegate the Pis and thumb drives to experimental status.

[Feathers McGraw]

Thank you both! Two very useful posts.

I think I had misunderstood about the write cycles, I read it as one cycle=one file written, and assumed that was the problem.

Good point, Steve, I do rely on them even though I thought i wouldn't when i started out... funny how much changes in such a short space of time, i was only messing around to begin with!

I'll wait it out for the server and stick the lot on there. It'll be nice to have a website that is more responsive, before "the incident" the site was getting 1100 visits/day, with almost 10x that many files transferred, which has got to be close to then limit for a Pi!

The decision now is this: do I use Debian stable or Ubuntu server? I'm leaning towards Ubuntu because there are some features in newer releases of Postfix that I'd like to try, for example the restrictions lists have been split into smtp_recipient_restrictions and smtp_relay_restrictions, which is neater.

[SteveRiley]

In Ubuntu, the following:

sudo apt-get install mail-stack-delivery amavisd-new-postfix

gets you a reasonably complete mail server with safe and sane defaults. Add Lighttpd, PHP5, and Roundcube -- done!

[Feathers McGraw]

Yeah but that's too easy

[Feathers McGraw]

I will, however, be trying out Roundcube! I like the look of the interface. I feel spoilt for CPU and RAM now!