When you contact our Support team, a technician might inform you of the need for a system reboot followed by a file system consistency check (fsck). This process analyzes your file system, looking for problems and attempting to fix them. The most important thing to know about a fsck is that it will take your websites offline until it completes.

A fsck doesn’t scan or manipulate any of the data within your files or directories. Instead, it checks ‘metadata’. Metadata is information that describes your actual data allowing the server to understand it. For example, title, file size, file location, and file author are all metadata. Having correct metadata is vital for your server to function properly. Otherwise, you could end up losing data.

Your server can run a fsck automatically with a reboot or a server administrator can manually run a fsck. There are many different situations that would warrant the need to run a fsck, including:

Hardware failure
Power failure
System crash
Improper shutdown

If your server hasn’t been rebooted in a long time, a fsck could take longer. How long a fsck takes depends on the number and organization of files on your server. To minimize downtime, you can schedule regular file system checks to run every other quarter. We recommend you reach out to us in order to schedule these when your site traffic is lowest.

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What is a File System Check (fsck)?