Configuration conpletly lost after unclean shutdown

[Clemens Eisserer]

Hi,

> I've experienced data loss in the way yo describe on a test-machine
> using btrfs. After changing to XFS (which I'm using exclusively on my
> other machines) I didn't encounter a single data loss, even after some
> severe crashes induced by sudden power loss.
>
> Thus, I suspect btrfs to play an important role here.

The colleague I was hiking with was using ext4, so I don't think it is
an btrfs bug itself.
I remember that when ext4 was introduced, people complained about
zero-length config files which suddenly happend because of new ext4
optimizations that  broke commonly used, but not specified behaviour.

I had a look at xfconf_backend_perchannel_xml_flush_channel() in
xfconf/xfconfd/xfconf-backend-perchannel-xml.c and it seems to be very
well written, taking into account all possible side effects as far as
I can see.

I'll try to investigate this issue a liitle bit more, as it seems I am
not the only one who has experienced this annoying loss of
configuration.

Best regards, Clemens