People have told me that since the EXT3 filesystem is journaling, that is there is almost never any loss of data due to an unattended shutdown. I was curious about why I just received the following message on startup after a power failure: ####### Start Message ####### Your filesystem appears to be shutdown uncleanly Press Y within 4 seconds to force file system integrity check #So I press 'y' /dev/hda5: /lost+found not found. CREATED /dev/hda5: Optimizind Directories: 16350 48487 63105 79467 94847 111234 126216 126813 141986 ....(continues).... /dev/hda5: ***** REBOOT LINUX ***** /dev/hda5: 63815/52416 files (0.3% non contiguous), 158268/504031 blocks Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors? (Y/N) (beware you can lose data) ####### END Message ####### What is the whole deal about losing data? Does that really happen/ how does it work? Thank you so much in advance for your input

Press 'Y' it does no harm. This happens to me from time to time and I have never lost data yet. You may come across an inode reference later on but that is also rare.

No loss of data at all? Well it can't be made perfect can it? The thing is that there is _less_ loss of data on journalling filesystems. So take care of the filesystem and unmount it before rebooting (reboot properly with shutdown -r)

Of course I try to shutdown the computer propperly when I can, but in the case of a power outage there isn't much I can do about it. I have never seen an error like this in all my years with working in a windows environment. I've been using linux now for a couple of years and this error sort of erks me. If EXT3 is journaling then it should approximately have about the same chance of data loss as NTFS. Of course there are signifigant differences between NTFS and EXT3, but does one handle unexpected shutdowns better than the other? Thanks in advance

"Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors? (Y/N) (beware you can lose data)" This is just an informative message. Repairing means changing something, usually deleting something that is wrong and replacing it. "What is the whole deal about losing data?" Data can mean any binary value on your disk. This includes metadata. If you have a corruption in some tree somewhere, you do not want to leave it. Correcting often means deleting portions of it. If some random file has been attached to those portions and metadata does not report this correctly, then that data could be lost. Data loss is a reality on any system. "I have never seen an error like this in all my years with working in a windows environment." Windows performs similar functions, it simply does not tell you it is doing this. There is most certainly data loss in Windows, so the fact that one OS has a prompt for it and another does not is rather trivial. "If EXT3 is journaling then it should approximately have about the same chance of data loss as NTFS." The implementation of a common feature means the filesystems both support the feature. It does not mean they both share a common implementation of that feature. "but does one handle unexpected shutdowns better than the other?" There is really no objective way to tell. You can proof it mathematically, but that cannot account for what an unexpected shutdown entails, the functions of the hardware, the drivers involved, and the sizes and complexity of data involved. I would say both are reliable.