Journaling
The Disk Utility application enables journaling on HFS+ volumes. Disk journaling is a feature that both increases filesystem stability and decreases recovery time in the event filesystem directory damage occurs.
With journaling enabled, the OS keeps a record, or journal, of all write operations to the disk. If the system ever stops unexpectedly due to a crash or power failure, the OS automatically “replays” the journal upon restart, ensuring that the disk and its directory are again consistent with each other, a processes that takes only a few seconds.
Without journaling enabled, the OS must perform a check of the entire filesystem following a crash to restore consistency. This can take up to several hours, depending on the size of the disk.
Journaling does slightly decrease disk-write performance, but this should only be an issue when working with high-end multimedia, for example, when disks need to perform as fast as possible.
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