The hunger for a bite of Zettabyte

I've been using ext3 as my filesystem of choice since I touched Linux sometime in 2004. And I've never been very disappointed until now. There was a time that I thought that reiserfs is better than ext3 so I switched, but this reiserfs betrayed me when it's journal got corrupted and I could no longer recover my data. Badly irritated, I switch back to ext3 and I'd been so happy using this ext3 until yesterday.

What happened yesterday? I booted Linux, entered gnome, opened nautilus, then my computer hanged. I couldn't use the keyboard and mouse so I forced a shutdown to my computer by pressing my computer's power off button. And surprised! My computer don't boot anymore. GRUB was giving error 17.

What did I do? I downloaded Ubuntu Live-cd and patiently waited for 8 hours for the download to finish. Then I borrowed my friend's laptop to burn the ubuntu iso image. I burned it and booted it and run it. And from the running live-cd, I googled for troubleshooting the GRUB error 17 and found out that the ext3 partition of my hard disk no longer contains a readable data. I googled again and again but found no appropriate solution. When I realized that I've already spent half of a day googling and reading solutions but finding no real answer, my last resort was to follow someone's suggestion and that is to use the fsck utility.

I run the dangerous fsck....

done...

I rebooted but now GRUB gives error 15. I booted from the live-cd again to see what's inside the "rescued ext3 partition". To my surprised, the ext3 was then able to be mounted. I thought my problem was already fixed. But when I looked inside the partition. I was shocked. It only contains a single "Lost+Found" folder that contain full of directories and files with names I can not understand. Where's my data!!!! I shouted.

After all the hassles and boring journey of trying to rescue the corrupted
ext3 filesystem, my reward is a "lost of data" award. I lost the files that I've been keeping since 2001. I lost the project files that I was currently working on. Can you imagine how miserable life ext3 gave me?

Dismayed, breathing deeply and with crossed eye brows, my only solution was to reinstall a new OS. The data that I lost from that corrupted ext3 is a big pain in the a$$.

"If I'm going to install a new OS, what would it be?" I asked myself. I remembered there is a filesystem that they call as the Zettabyte File System or ZFS. I think it is the best file system available today. It is the default filesystem of any opensolaris distribution. It's maybe the right time to try opensolaris and take advantage of its ZFS goodness. What I want about ZFS is its ability to self heal and its defensive and careful approach to managing data. I hope, with ZFS, I will never experience again the same trouble that ext3 gave me.