Friday, August 12, 2011

Journaled Mac File System in Mac OS X

Journaling is a concept  that protects system integrity. It protects Mac from data loss due to its  accidentally shut down. This concept was first introduced with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (non server).   According to which, the file system which are journaling enabled itself keep record of changes made  there in file system. It actually maintain a Journal of the changes made in file system which is used to maintain the integrity of file system whenever it crashes down accidentally .  During the startup, OS will simply read this journal and restore the consistency of the file system.

If Mac has been accidentally restarted while working and if the drives are  journaling enabled then  it will not take very less time to mount all files because it  need not to check whole Mac for consistency. It only perform consistency check on the particular file or folder and return to consistent state however all the data that was present in buffer at that time will be lost.

However it is up to the user he/she can either enable or disable the journaling feature on the disk. Changing disk Journaling feature is just two step task:
1 . Choose disk in the drop-down menu.
2 . Click the disable / enable button.

So integrity of Mac after Panther has increased to much.  No doubt Journaling enable drive started creating journals and tracking each and every change in file system but  What in the case of  file system corruption, which is very common in Mac. Talking about the most common scenario of file system corruption for internal drive is accidental shut down due to any reason for example power failure or others.  In the same way for external drive it could be due to error occurred while connecting it to Mac or dis connection of connection wire when at the time of data transfer. If you facing this disaster, one and only solution that will work for you is Mac data recovery software.  So make sure you have one of the trusted  recovery software such as Stellar Phoenix Mac data recovery software within the reach of you, before moving forward.

If file system error occur in  drive it will go in unmounted state and while trying to mount it using disk utility an error message appears “mount Failed”! This error basically means the Mac is facing some hardware issues. The software which I used to repair and verify my hard drive was Stellar Volume Repair though we can also do it with disk utility. Why I used this party tool is because of my previous experience (Read my Personal Experience:  What if Drive disappears From your Mac ) with disk utility was not good. 

Stellar Volume repair will repair and rebuilt the hard drive and this made the drive visible in the mounted state. Now what reinitialize the hard drive with Mac supported file systems (Journaled).  During the initialization process you will lost the data but don't worry you can recover whole data using effective mac data recovery software such as Stellar Phoenix easily after having Mac support file system.