22 Feb
2017
22 Feb
'17
3:49 a.m.
From: Larry McVoy
The DOS file system, while stupid, was very robust in
the face of
crashes
I'm not sure it's so much the file system (in the sense of the on-disk
format), as how the system _used_ it (although I suppose one could consider
that part of the FS too).
The duplicated FAT, and the way file sectors are linked using it, is I suppose
a little more robust than other designs (e.g. the way early Unixes did it,
with indirect blocks and free lists), but I think a lot of it must have been
that DOS wrote stuff out quickly (as opposed to e.g. the delayed writes on
early Unix FS's, etc). That probably appoximated the write-ordering of more
designed-robust FS's.
Noel