[Users] ?==?utf-8?q? claws-mail and file system corruption

[briand@pounceofcats.com]

On Monday, May 04, 2020 09:36 CEST, Abrolag <abrolag at users.sourceforge.net> wrote: 
 
> On Mon, 04 May 2020 06:45:37 +0200
> briand at pounceofcats.com <briand at pounceofcats.com> wrote:
> 
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I hesitate to even bring this up, but i can't seem to figure out what's going on and i'm reaching for the very, extremely, improbable.
> >
> >Twice now i've had filesystem corruption (linux, ext4) and the majority of the recovered data from fsck were files/folders in Mail.  which seems reasonable (because it's touched frequenctly) except
> 
> Is this on spinning rust?
> 
> If so it might be a bad patch on the disk. Claws writes quite small files, so
> they might be written in the same area of the disk.

it is an HD and not a SSD.  i had the same thought.  so i took drastic action.

i did

mkfs.ext4 -c 

and created a new partition, the -c option turns on "slow" bad block checking.  naturally it did not report any bad blocks (i don't know if such a report would be verbose or if it would just silently make a list of them).  i also ran the smartctl short and long tests and they both claimed nothing wrong.  and the smart attributes on the disk all claim 0 errors.

i installed my back-up, and now i wait for something to go wrong again.

BTW, is there anything in the documentation about how claws stores the mail files ? i'm in the unfortunate position of having to recover some mail files from lost+found.

as far as i can tell, i simply need to number the files in the appropriate directory and everthing should be ok, and i've tried that on a limited basis and it worked , but i haven't found anything in the documentation. 

Thank you.