ext3 can bite me. hard.

Dear ext3,

I’d like to thank you for the fantastic improvements you’ve introduced over ext2, like your ability to render deleted files completely unrecoverable due to your wonderful ability to zero out all of the inodes.

I understand that this helps you recover better from crashes. Congratulations!

I also understand that this makes all of those pesky user errors, where someone types the wrong rm -Rf command, which never happens, absolute. When a user makes a change on an ext3 system, that change is made! Huzzah! And you’re the default on most new Linux installs! Good for you. Glad to see you’re getting ahead in the world.

It’s probably a good thing that they don’t mention that files are unrecoverable from you when they install you, right? I mean, that would be embarassing. And we can’t have that!

Now, instead of using all of those ext2 utilities - you know, those ones that all those linux distros swear will still work with you - I can learn to make peace with watching loved ones lose years of work in such a way that even throwing thousands of dollars at the problem will not solve! Now I get to learn how to scrape the binary off a disk, once we determine what the header and footer of obscure astronomical data files are and talk to the very nice developer of PhotoRec to please add them into the supported filetypes.

Because, you know, I really was getting kinda bored, what with the life and job and family and whatnot.

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Brett

P.S. I‘m switching everyone I know to HFS+ or ZFS. Even FAT32 is lookin’ pretty good in my book now. But don’t take it personally!

(Crossposted to my LiveJournal, because sometimes I actually do want comments and advice. That’s why I have a LiveJournal.)