I've actually used Ext2 in production, back in the '90s. That's all we had back then. A bit later I've also played a lot with XFS, both on Linux and Irix (I've worked at SGI for a while in the '00s).
Back in ye olden days, yanking the power cord basically guaranteed a corrupt Ext2 FS and a visit from fsck. However, in the vast majority of cases, fsck would actually do the job. You had to peruse lost+found and recover the lost souls out of it, but that was usually the extent of it. I did 'fsck -y' many, many times - in most cases with good results.
XFS on PC was worse. It tended to be stupendously fast when dealing with lots of I/O to/from very large files (video editing, running VMs), but a power failure on PC was a lot worse than with Ext2. There was a good chance you would lose the whole volume.
On Irix / SGI hardware it was a very different story. Those suckers were quite reliable. Heavy as hell, too.
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One habit from back then that's very hard to shake off is to run sync before reboot, often as "sync; reboot" - you know, just in case something gets stuck on the way down and you have to hit the reset button. A more extreme example would be to manually stop all services except sshd, then do "sync; reboot".
It's completely unjustified today, and yet I still do "sync; reboot" occasionally. It's baked into the muscle memory of my fingers after sleepless nights caused by losing stuff due a flaky driver that froze the system on reboot.
Back in ye olden days, yanking the power cord basically guaranteed a corrupt Ext2 FS and a visit from fsck. However, in the vast majority of cases, fsck would actually do the job. You had to peruse lost+found and recover the lost souls out of it, but that was usually the extent of it. I did 'fsck -y' many, many times - in most cases with good results.
XFS on PC was worse. It tended to be stupendously fast when dealing with lots of I/O to/from very large files (video editing, running VMs), but a power failure on PC was a lot worse than with Ext2. There was a good chance you would lose the whole volume.
On Irix / SGI hardware it was a very different story. Those suckers were quite reliable. Heavy as hell, too.
---
One habit from back then that's very hard to shake off is to run sync before reboot, often as "sync; reboot" - you know, just in case something gets stuck on the way down and you have to hit the reset button. A more extreme example would be to manually stop all services except sshd, then do "sync; reboot".
It's completely unjustified today, and yet I still do "sync; reboot" occasionally. It's baked into the muscle memory of my fingers after sleepless nights caused by losing stuff due a flaky driver that froze the system on reboot.