Dumpe2fs – Understanding Lifetime Writes

filesystemshard-disk

For example, if I run:

sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sda1

I get detailed information about the partition.

I'm confused about this part, Lifetime writes, returns the following for my boot partition:

Lifetime writes:          12 kB

What does this 12 Kb mean?

This is full output:

user@root:/data$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sdb1
dumpe2fs 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          5524d5a6-4635-48a6-8cd9-a636e3ad2b2c
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash 
Default mount options:    user_xattr acl
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              121680
Block count:              486144
Reserved block count:     0
Free blocks:              477783
Free inodes:              121669
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Reserved GDT blocks:      118
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         8112
Inode blocks per group:   507
Filesystem created:       Thu Mar 27 03:18:09 2014
Last mount time:          Thu Mar 27 03:18:34 2014
Last write time:          Thu Mar 27 03:18:56 2014
Mount count:              1
Maximum mount count:      -1
Last checked:             Thu Mar 27 03:18:09 2014
Check interval:           0 (<none>)
Lifetime writes:          12 kB
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:           256
Required extra isize:     28
Desired extra isize:      28
Default directory hash:   half_md4
Directory Hash Seed:      8f43123d-1451-4047-a26c-d5227fd80240

Best Answer

It's all the writes in Bytes that the file system has since its creation. In your case only 12kB has been written since the creation of the partition. Remember that dumpe2fs reports the value as it was at the time when the file system was last unmounted, which could be wrong or obsolete in mounted file systems.

Related Question