Journaling Versus Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems Margo I. Seltzer,* Gregory R. Ganger,** M. Kirk McKusick,*** Keith A. Smith,* Craig A.N. Soules,** and Christopher A. Stein* *Harvard University, **Carnegie Mellon University, ***Author and Consultant 1 Abstract The UNIX Fast File System (FFS) is probably the most widely-used file system for performance comparisons.