> Try testing your code by putting it in a loop and repeatedly pulling the power plug out of the wall, and see if you always end up with an uncorrupted file. (Yes, people do this sort of testing on highly fault-tolerant systems
I've had "fun" with this on some Windows CE systems, building my own little log-structured database to address the problem. All writes are appends, one disk block at a time, flushing afterwards. Worked well when using TFAT ("transactional" FAT) as the underlying file system, but when tried on a normal PC we discovered a new exciting failure mode: the file ended up with a random chunk of recently-deleted data at the end of it.
I've had "fun" with this on some Windows CE systems, building my own little log-structured database to address the problem. All writes are appends, one disk block at a time, flushing afterwards. Worked well when using TFAT ("transactional" FAT) as the underlying file system, but when tried on a normal PC we discovered a new exciting failure mode: the file ended up with a random chunk of recently-deleted data at the end of it.