Well, I never used Reiser seriously, just "tried it" sometimes. I knew it had some annoying issues so I never took it seriously. I use mainly ext3 with some XFS archives, or a RAID1 array of two XFS disks containing some important data, and I do some DVD backups once in a while, y'know, things like these.
I also had a major data loss once, though. But it wasn't a filesystem fault, it was just... well, a faulty cable. The filesystem (ext3) was damn solid. But it was no use, the metadata were unreadable.
I lost 151GIGS of
very precious stuff. I had a hard time to take everything back, but at the end now I am
much more careful when it comes down to data storage. I learnt
mdadm, I studied the RAID structures and I tested many filesystems. Now I happily live with my ext3 and XFS HDDs.
P-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y.
Later I investigated and I discovered that the faulty cable may have twisted some signals and the HDD heads may have overwritten some filesystem metadata and/or superblocks. No way to recover it, only light a candle and say some prayers to the poor defunct.
And give a good dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd bs=4096 and a mke2fs -j /dev/hdd soon thereafter.
I was naive, too; I learnt three precious lessons:
1-data aren't eternal;
2-data aren't everything;
3-backups save the day.
Don't worry. Now I am sure I will never, ever be involved with anyting related to ReiserFS. Not anymore. The poor faith I had in Reiser now is all gone.