[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Ok, first I admit that I don't fully understand this whole journaling thing so forgive any misinformation here.

I have had OSX's file Journaling on since it came out on 10.2.2. I ran FSCK -y before turning it on.

For the past month I haven't had any problems with my computer. After I installed 10.2.3 my computer started to completely freeze at random times.

I ran FSCK -y but it told me that since journaling was on I would have to force a FSCK. Fine, I did and it found lots of probs with the disk and fixed them all. Now the freezing is totally gone.

What I am asking is how did this corruption to the drive happen in the fist place? I THOUGHT that journaling was supposed to prevent things like this.

Since FSCK -y is not run at startup with journaling on I assume that with journaling off the problem would have been automatically found and corrected long ago.

Can anyone fill me in? If journaling is not preventing damages like this then should I even bother having it on?

Thanks

[Northform]

Journaling does not prevent problems. It simply keeps a record that allows the computer to recover from certain drive problems without having to run a disk scanning utility.

It's not that great/important a feature for home users.

EDIT: Basically there isn't a good reason for you to have it on.

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Originally posted by Northform:
Journaling does not prevent problems. It simply keeps a record that allows the computer to recover from certain drive problems without having to run a disk scanning utility.

So it didn't really prevent anything for me then other then the running the disk utility that would have fixed it.

You can see where I get lost right?

[alex_kac]

What it prevents is, say that your computer crashes during a write operation - the disk catalog will still be OK. That's about it