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It's been 4 years since I stopped working on my Linux internet radio box. My Linux box was Ubuntu 6.04 with Ext3 fs. At user-space, everything works perfectly except I occasionally bumped into corrupted fs issue if I disconnect the USB forcefully.

I'd love to hear recommendations from experts on which fs would suits my case. I also heard about compress the whole system into a file then uncompress them during bootstrap phase, then again I am clueless and really appreciate if someone could point me to right direction.

Many thanks.

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If you write infrequently, read mostly then ext2 is sufficient as journaling is not necessary. otherwise it depends on use. Also, look at SquashFS – bdowning Mar 14 '12 at 12:10
SquashFS seems the way to go for storing compressed kernel image. The box still need an persistent partition for storing favorites radio channel files, though it's not written frequently. Again, w/o journal, I am afraid of higher tendency of file corruption. – Trung Le Mar 14 '12 at 12:35
Filesystem corruption should only happen in there's data being written to the filesystem (not considering hardware issues, of course). Journal helps doing the recovery, but what is the point of the journal if the filesystem ends up being written only twice a day? That's why @bdowning pointed out that "it depends on use". You'd also probably benefit from looking at how several LiveCDs do it, sometimes a mix of SquashFS and unionFS. The only thing is that they usually mount SquashFS together with a ramdrive, but that's just a detail you can change. – njsg Mar 14 '12 at 13:43
Isn't running your filesystems read only enough? For filesystems which need write access you can create a filesystem in memory... – Jiri Xichtkniha Mar 14 '12 at 15:11
Journaling isn't necessary for occasional writes, regardless of journal, read-only, etc. you still need to periodically fsck. I use ext2 for my /boot on several machines. That is read mostly, write on kernel update. – bdowning Mar 14 '12 at 21:10
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Checkout UBIFS. It is fault tolerant to power cuts and is used in a number of products.

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