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tomberttoday at 4:50 AM2 repliesview on HN

On a recent project I have needed to use exFAT. exFAT is terrible for a number of reasons, but in my case the thing I had to deal with was the lack of journaling, which had the possibility to corrupt files if there were a power interruption or something.

I initially was writing a series of files and doing some quasi-append-only things with new files and compacting the old one to sort of reinvent journaling. What I did more or less worked but it was very ad hoc and bad and was probably hiding a lot of bugs I would eventually have to fix later.

And then I remembered SQLite. I realized that ACID was probably safe enough for my needs, and then all the hard parts I was reinventing were probably faster and less likely to break if I used something thoroughly audited and tested, so I reworked everything I was doing to SQLite and it worked fine.

I wish exFAT would die in a fire and a journaling filesystem would replace it as the "one filesystem you can use everywhere", but until it does I'm grateful SQLite exists.


Replies

tophamtoday at 5:16 AM

The problem with it is you didn't solve your biggest actual problem, you just haven't had a problem bite you in the ass yet so you think your problem is solved.

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mmoosstoday at 5:14 AM

> I wish exFAT would die in a fire and a journaling filesystem would replace it as the "one filesystem you can use everywhere"

Where exactly is everywhere? Win32? All of Linux? BSDs? MacOS? IOS? ...

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