[PLUG] fsck: recommended options? [UPDATE]

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 4 Aug 2019, Rich Shepard wrote:

> My daily logwatch report shows kernel errors on the external backup drive,
> /dev/sdb/, an ext3 file system. It's been a very long time since I had
> occasion to manually run fsck.

Yesterday, thanks to advice from Wes, Cathy, and Rodney I ran fsck on the
external backup drive using it's UUID. This morning's logwatch report still
contains the warnings:

  ################### Logwatch 7.4.3 (04/27/16) ####################
         Processing Initiated: Mon Aug  5 03:10:03 2019
         Date Range Processed: yesterday
                               ( 2019-Aug-04 )
                               Period is day.
         Detail Level of Output: 0
         Type of Output/Format: mail / text
         Logfiles for Host: salmo
  ##################################################################

  --------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------

  WARNING:  Kernel Errors Present
     EXT4-fs (sdb): error count since last ...:  1 Time(s)
     EXT4-fs (sdb): initial error at time 15645858 ...:  1 Time(s)
     EXT4-fs (sdb): last error at time 15645858 ...:  1 Time(s)

  ---------------------- Kernel End -------------------------

The fstab entries for this drive are:

UUID=da596a77-2fb4-41ed-881c-a3f8bb0ab437 /mnt/backup  auto defaults  0 0
/dev/sdb         /mnt/hd          ext3        noauto,users,rw  0   0

I want to understand the kernel warning and fix whatever causes it.

The fsck man page says that -p is the same as the deprecated -a, especially
for e2fsck. The fsck.ext3 man page says that -p "Automatically repair
("preen") the file system. This option will cause e2fsck to automatically
fix any filesystem problems that can be safely fixed without human
intervention."

Should I run e2fsck -p on this drive?

Insights wanted,

Rich