[adrian_b]

A few decades ago, XFS was notorious because a power failure would wipe out various files, even if they had been opened only for reading. For instance, I had seen many systems that were bricked because XFS wiped out /etc/fstab after a power failure.

Nevertheless, many, many years ago, the XFS problems have been removed and today it is very robust.

During the last few years, I have seen a great number of power failures on some computers without a UPS, where XFS was used intensively at the moment of the power failure. Despite that, in none of those cases there was any filesystem corruption whatsoever, but the worst that has ever happened was the loss of the last writes performed immediately before the power failure.

This is the behavior that is expected from any file system that claims to be journaled, even in the past many journaled file systems failed to keep their promises, e.g. a few decades ago I had seen corrupted file systems on all existing Linux file systems and also on NTFS. At that time only the FreeBSD UFS with "soft updates" was completely unaffected by any kind of power failures.

However, nowadays I would expect all these file systems to be much more mature and to have fixed any bugs long ago.

BTRFS appears to be the exception, as the stories about corruption events do not seem to diminish in time.