[PLUG] Forced fsck

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 8 May 2006 21:48:42 +0000
Auke Kok <sofar at foo-projects.org> dijo:

> by default ext3 gets checked every N time *or* every N days, 
> whichever comes first. Sooner or later you'll hit the 180days 
> mark which is the default for the N days value ;^)

Very interesting discussion, which I am finding very educational! A few questions:

1) I haven't experienced any problem in the past year running my hard drive with ext3. So what would y'all recommend for a laptop that is rebooted an average of 1.5 times a day and for which a backup of /home+ is made every time a significant amount of new stuff is added (like a day or two of work)? Like, how often should fsck be run? I'm not interested in *absolute* safety; I'm interested in what is reasonable. E.g., in the final analysis, we're all dead anyway. So what is a reasonable tradeoff between safety and usability?

2) I just ordered a new 80 GB 7200 rpm hard disk for my laptop. Should I put ext3 on it, or might something else be better? 

3) What utilities exist for transferring the old stuff to the new? Like, is there a utility that will copy the existing hard drive to the new one so that I can just pop the new one in and be able to boot the computer as if nothing happened? [The existing hard drive is 60 GB and I have a 60 GB external USB pocket drive that I can use for this process.] What utilities are there to make a disk image? Or should I just plan on starting over from scratch? (ugh)

Suggestions welcome :)