# softupdates journaling odd behaviour?



## brom (Mar 31, 2012)

Hello,

System is FreeBSD 9.0, GPT + UFS with softupdates journaling. I was confronted with an interesting situation. E.g. if I make some changes to text files or create some new files and then perform a hard, unclean reboot, these changes are gone. (reboot was made 1-3 min after these changes). New files are  completely gone, files where I made changes became a zero size.

What could be the reason? Any comment are welcome.


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## YZMSQ (Mar 31, 2012)

I'm not an expert who can tell you the details, but using SU+J sometimes may potentially lead to more data loss when confronted with the hard reboot as you've experienced. There are some brief introductions about SU in "Tuning Disks" Chapter of handbook.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Mar 31, 2012)

/usr/ports/packages/

```
find . -type f
```
I have reproduced .tbz disappearing [1] "reliably" between normal reboots. (SUJ, v9), even with "sync" before shutdown. I do not know if it is related to the symlinks in that particular subtree or something else. So I am very interested in this thread, for the time being I have a workaround in place.
[1] All of them (usually) in one (y) or more (?) subdirectories.


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## brom (Apr 2, 2012)

Hi,

*P*robably *I* was wrong about time of reboot. This is a SU issue completely. Journaling does not matter. It's related to these kernel variables (default, values in sec):

```
kern.filedelay: 30 
kern.dirdelay: 29 
kern.metadelay: 28
```

*M*y changes were not written from dirty buffer to disk. So this is "normal" behaviour.


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