Journaling hard drives

[cephoto]

I have several external firewire hard drives, formatted HFS+. Should I set Journaling "on" on these drives? What's the advantage of Journaling hard drives?

 

[varmit]

I have several external firewire hard drives, formatted HFS+. Should I set Journaling "on" on these drives? What's the advantage of Journaling hard drives?

Journaling means the hard drive keeps a record of what goes on. That means when you move a file, your hard drive keeps a record of that move. The reason for this, is if the power goes out while you are in the middle of moving a file, and the Mac turns off. You would think, "oh crap, it didn't finish, my hard drive is corrupt now". So when your Mac gets turned back on, it reads the journal, sees that you were in the middle of a copy, corrects any problem that might occur due to a bad copy, thus keeping the hard drive integrity. Otherwise, you could end up like a lot of windows 98 machines that don't have journalling when the power goes out. Corrupt disks and unable to boot.

Journalling is a good thing, you will most likely want to have it on. Thought it does affect speed a little bit, but its worth it in the end.

 

[cephoto]

Thanks for your advice. Sounds like a good thing and I will Journal all my drives.