crash-consistency · shipping · also crash consistency

Crash consistency

Crash consistency is the property that persistent state remains within an application's allowed recovery states after an unexpected interruption.

It is distinct from preserving every acknowledged update: an older, internally consistent state may still violate durability. Pillai et al. distinguish persistence ordering and atomicity, while SQLite documents a concrete rollback-journal protocol. Filesystem metadata consistency alone does not establish that an application's multi-file transaction committed.

Relations

related

fsync, writeback-error, copy-on-write

Citations

1. Pillai et al. (OSDI 2014): All File Systems Are Not Created Equal (accessed 2026-10-10)
2. SQLite: Atomic Commit (accessed 2026-10-10)
3. Hesela: Why retrying a failed fsync does not prove durability (accessed 2026-10-10)

JSON: /data/terms/crash-consistency.json