There is a lot of FUD floating around about us. This particular rumor has the advantage that it sounds right if you don't look at the code. You know, balanced trees, sounds complex, must be fragile. When we run fsck --rebuild-tree, it throws the entire internal tree structure away and is able to rebuild it from scratch by looking at the leaves, so I don't think that is very fragile at all. I don't know of any cases using a recent fsck where we could not get data back and ext3 could have. If you know of such cases, let me know. Now before I say too much, let me acknowledge a few things. When we first shipped in 1999, we had no fsck at all. That was pretty fragile.....;-) Then we had an fsck that was very buggy. Now, we finally have a decent fsck. It just took time.

We threw V3 in the trash and rewrote it completely from scratch, this time the right way.