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Tip 1507 Printable Monobook Previous Next

created 2007 · complexity intermediate · author Yakov Lerner · version 6.0


Bad luck happens.

On the Vim mailing list, one user complained about irrepairable file corruption that happened after OS crash and reboot. The filesystem repair utility, fsck, dutily repaired the filesystem at the expense of losing large pieces of data from his file. Yick. Recently changed files suffer most danger if OS crashes.

The following autocommand will decrease chances of file loss in case of unexpected hardware failure or unexpected electricity failure:

" disk sync after every write
au BufWritePost * silent !sync

May uninterrupted power be with you.

Comments[]

  • Be careful, this can freeze your vim session on heavy disk io, e.g. writing to a slow usb flash.
  • Setting option 'swapsync' might be an alternative to the mentioned autocommand.

Well, bad luck happens, but irrepairable filesystem corruption is extremely rare on journalising filesystems. I use reiserfs, because that was the only one which was available and "stably" supported when I installed a new drive some years ago; but on recent Linux kernels ext3 and (even better, I've been told) ext4 filesystems are recommended, with the advantage that you can convert an ext2 filesystem to them in-place. An other, very old, trick consists in saving your data to disk at intervals of between five minutes and a quarter-hour, and also every time you leave the keyboard, even if it's just to take a leak. — Tonymec 16:14, September 11, 2011 (UTC)

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