What is Journaling?

[Poidog]

Hi,

Sorry for newbie OSX question but what is journaling and why should I turn this off. How do I turn it off if it is already enabled on my hard drive? Thanks!

[Releaux]

Hi Poidog,

One of the very best professors I had in college was the one who taught us how to use the library and find answers. It was one of the most valuable skills I learned from him.

With that in mind, finding the answer to your question would have taken you less time than it took you to post if you'd used the nifty "Help" menu in OS X. =-)

Since we're already here, though, I'll cut and paste the information that comes up as the first result when you enter "file journaling" in the Mac OS X Help search field:

Using journaling to safeguard your information

When journaling is enabled on a hard disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the hard disk to a known good state when your computer restarts.

If you install Mac OS X version 10.3 on a newly formatted HFS Plus hard disk, journaling is enabled. If you upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.3 from an earlier version of Mac OS X, journaling is not enabled. It's a good idea to turn journaling on in most cases.

To turn journaling on:

1. Open Disk Utility, located in Applications/Utilities.

2. Select the disk or volume in the left column of the Disk Utility window.

3. Click Enable Journaling in the toolbar.

That answers your first and third questions. I found the answer to your second question by entering "file journaling" in Google. The very first result is a page titled File Journaling in OS X Panther Explained.

I highly recommend that you read the entire article, but here is the relevant part that answers your second question:

The problem is that journaling takes time. Enough time that it is worth considering turning journaling off on all your media drives. The benefit is that you get faster performance. The disadvantage is that in the event of a crash, you don't have the protection journaling provides. On the third hand, hard drives with journaling turned off are in no worse shape than hard drives running under OS 10.2.

In my experience with a wide variety of media clients, disk directory problems almost never arise with secondary drives, they are almost exclusively the domain of the boot disk.

As Apple writes:

"If your [computer] contains high-bandwidth usage data files, such as large video, graphics, or audio files, you may want to weigh the benefits of using journaling against the performance needed to access your data. In most cases, the impact of journaling upon data access performance are unnoticeable to users, but its implementation may not be practical for [computers] where data access demands outweigh its benefits."

Apple's help is really quite good and, if that fails, Google knows just about everything.

[Tritonemusic]

Originally posted by Ray Toler:
Hi Poidog,

One of the very best professors I had in college was the one who taught us how to use the library and find answers. It was one of the most valuable skills I learned from him.

With that in mind, finding the answer to your question would have taken you less time than it took you to post if you'd used the nifty "Help" menu in OS X. =-)

Ray, you are my Hero.

[Releaux]

666 wrote:

Ray, you are my Hero.

I just hope my tone wasn't too bitchy because that certainly wasn't my intent. Learning how to find relevant and appropriate information quickly is probably one of the most important skills we can have these days - there's way too much info assaulting us every day.

Since I alluded to it in my first post, I'll tell the story of that professor's lesson. It was a class in the History of Theater which ended up being one of the most in-depth general history classes I've ever taken (how are you going to act like a 14th century peasant if you don't know what was going on around you at the time?).

One of the first papers the professor assigned was this: "Pick any Shakespeare play with the exception of Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet."

(So far so good, right?)

"I want to know the date of its premiere and who played the lead roles."

(Not too bad... I can probably find that out).

"I also want to know every significant production of that play and the actors who played the leads since the premiere. Additionally, if there was anything interesting about a particular production, I want to know about that too.

(Crickets chirping in the classroom.)

"And I want it on Friday."

(MUST... CONTROL... HAND... OF.... DEATH!)

As you can imagine, we were all speechless for about 30 seconds, and then the class exploded in a cacophony of various epithets, begging for extensions, etc. After all, he wanted a paper dealing every production of a play for the last 400 or so years in less than a week.

The professor simply smiled and said, "Well... we'll knock off 15 minutes early today so you can get started on this."

Friday came and my professor asked, "Who has their paper prepared?" About half of the class raised their hands. He then asked, "Who actually attempted to do the paper?" The same hands went up.

He asked me what I had found out while writing my paper. I said that there was a book in the library that had more or less exactly the information he asked for and that cross referenced another book with "significant events" that happened during certain productions.

Here was his lesson and it's stuck with me to this day:

There are thousands and thousands of people in the world that feel that, for whatever reason, they need to get a Masters degree or Ph.D. Every one of these people has had to write a thesis document. It is highly unlikely that anything you might want to know hasn't already been written about at least once and probably three times by one of these poor people.

(He had, by the way, his Bachelors from Harvard and his Masters and Ph.D. from Yale. - All three degrees were hung in his bathroom over the toilet.)

He then went on to say, "As theater majors" (which most of us were) "there are two probable career paths for you. One or two of you might actually end up being able to make a living as actors. The rest of you, if you decide to stay in the field, will probably end up teaching.

"If you are going to teach, you will most likely need at least one advanced degree. You've never been taught how to really use the library and if you don't have this skill, you will not be able to get an advanced degree. So I am making this one of my priorities in this class. Not only will you learn a great deal more about history than you've ever learned before, you will learn how to find that history."

Searching isn't always easy, and learning how to sift through results quickly is another skill that seems like it should be a no-brainer, but sometimes isn't. So sometimes people don't think about searching first rather than asking. When you do learn search skills, it's really pretty liberating.

Unless, of course, all of your friends figure out that you're good at it and call you all the time asking you to do a quick lookup for them...

[Tritonemusic]

I just hope my tone wasn't too bitchy because that certainly wasn't my intent.

No, you didn't sound bitchy at all. At least you didn't say RTFM like I always do. As for your teacher; he sounds like a great guy. There aren't enough good ones to go around. Isn't it amazing how something someone says on any given day can completely change the way you view and do things for the rest of your life? Well, I'll stop rambling now.

[rikp]

I really did enjoy both lessons. I am a professor and can really relate to your prof's intentions for the class. So many of my students just want the grade without actually knowing how to "do",ask questions, or really dig for information.

Now moving along. I did open up my Disk Utility and the Enable Journaling is grayed out. Do I assume that it is already working? I am on system 10.3.7 but I did upgrade to get to 10.3.

Peace

Rik

[Tritonemusic]

Yes, it is enabled.

[Releaux]

Hi Rik,

I think journaling is enabled for you, but I've never bothered worrying about it on my machines, so I can't say so definitively.

When I clicked on the "Info" button in disk utility, this line seemed pertinent:

File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

[rikp]

Thanks Ray! I will also give that a try!

Peace

Rik

[Timeline]

Great thread...

Enjoyed!

Thanks

Gary
Timeline