How reliable is PFS-2 ?

There have been no reviews done on PFS-2 yet.

AFS was very reliable. Read the reviews. CU/Amiga said :-

"AFS doesn't invalidate disks.  During the course of our tests we reset whilst writing files, powered down when the buffers were being flushed and pulled the SCSI cable out of the drives.  This is just asking for trouble, but not once through all these heinous eye watering test could we corrupt the AFS partitions !"

AFS and PFS-2 have been written to perform disk operations in an atomic way.  When control information is updated it writes it to a different place.  In the event of a system failure this disk will be in one of two states, both of which are valid :-

  1. Disk updated successfully
  2. Disk left as it was

You can see that a disk operation is either performed or isn't.  There are no intermediate states.  This is what is meant by the term "atomic".

AFS and PFS-2 drive the hardware close to its limits.  For this reason the MaxTransfer and, to a lesser extent the DMAMask, values must be set correctly.  The AFS documentation explains "how" to set these parameters but not necessarily what values to pick.  Please read the set-up part of the FAQ for more details :-

  1. What is MaxTransfer ?
  2. What value should MaxTransfer be ?
  3. What is DMAMask ?
  4. What value should DMAMask be ?

As with any file system applications that corrupt memory may result in corrupt files.   In the event of an attempt to corrupt the file system, PFS-2 converts the file system to read-only, protecting your precious data.

REMEMBER nothing is completely safe, which is why everyone should make regular backups, regardless of the file system that they use.