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Systems & Data Center · Foundational

Journaling File System

A filesystem that records pending changes in a journal before committing them, enabling fast and consistent recovery after a crash.

Definition

By writing intent records to a journal first, the filesystem can replay or discard incomplete operations after power loss instead of scanning the entire disk. ext3, ext4, XFS and NTFS are journaling filesystems.

Example

After an unclean shutdown, ext4 replays its journal at mount time in seconds rather than running a lengthy full fsck.

Exam tip

Journaling protects filesystem consistency (usually metadata), not necessarily the contents of every data write.

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