Journaling question

I am doing a new install of FCS on a new system drive and I formatted the drive without journaling. I have seen a couple mentions here that the system drive should be journaled and Larry Jordan mentioned it on his site but I have not seen any official Apple documentation. It doesn't look like you can enable journaling after the fact. I have only installed a couple of apps on the new system drive so now would be a good time if I need to reformat the drive journaled and start the installs again.

So I am just looking for confirmation: journaling on for the system disk and journaling off for the media disks.

Correct?

Journaling allows the system to recover from errors very much better, however it slows the system down very slightly.

I'm believing that Apple's recommendation is to journal everything, but that flies in the face of standard practice.

Standard Practice is to Do Everything Possible Wrong and then wonder why your captures and playback don't work right. In that case, journaling your data or video drives may be enough to push you over the edge to a damaged show.

The System Drive should always be journaled--no question.

No, I don't think you can change it later.

[www.lafcpug.org]

Koz

You are correct. You can turn on/off journaling using the Disk Utility >File Menu.

Here is an Apple doc

[docs.info.apple.com]

Michael Horton
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Hmmm. Guess you cant turn it on/off once its off. At least with OS 10.4.10. Just checked. When did that happen?

Michael Horton
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Thanks Koz, I appreciate your help very much!

Thanks Michael, I tried to turn journaling on in Disk Utility but I it wouldn't allow it. I believe you can turn it off if it was on to begin with but not turn it on if it wasn't formatted that way originally.

That's my guess anyways.

I dont remember it being that way. At least not with Panther. Been along time.

Michael Horton
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I didn't know there was that much shifting in the tools. Goodness.

Anyway, if you do absolutely everything correctly--separate cards for each FireWire drive, no drive ever over 90%, etc. etc, then journaling on the capture drives may be more benefit than liability.

But for systems where you fall from grace every so often (daisy chained laptops), then yes, you should probably journal the System Drive only.

Koz

Hi Guys,

You can turn Journaling off at any time. Open Disk Utility, select the drive in question, then, hold down the Option key and then click on the File Menu > Disable Journaling.

To turn Journaling on, select in Disk Utility > File menu > Enable Journaling (no Option key).

--ken

Ah. Thanks Ken. Guess they don't want you mucking with it. Beats hell out of reformating.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Tech Tool Pro 4.x also allows "live" enable/disable of Journaling. I like ken's tip, tho.

- Loren
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Kozikowski Wrote:
> I'm believing that Apple's recommendation is to
> journal everything, but that flies in the face of
> standard practice.

Journaling is only supposed to be applied to the boot volume. It's a UNIX thing that allows the OS startup to recover much faster IF the OS crashed on a prior event. Journaling any other volume does nothng.

<<<Journaling is only supposed to be applied to the boot volume. It's a UNIX thing that allows the OS startup to recover much faster IF the OS crashed on a prior event. Journaling any other volume does nothng.>>>

I wondered about that.

Given that everything looks like a mounted file system to UNIX, would a journaled System Drive "protect" a mounted external drive?

Koz

Koz,

It's not really a protection thing, rather a speed up reboot thing that Journaling enables.

UNIX likes to run FOREVER, and a crash unsettles it. Journaling was implemented in UNIX a few years ago and has spead up recovery from a crash situation. Since UNIX does it own housekeeping functions, the journaling record provides a fast look at the last (x) number of events before the crash and the kernel can act on that best information to keep from running FSCK at eack boot time.