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This paper describes the work to add ‘‘journaling lite’ ’ to soft updates and its incorporation into the FreeBSD fast filesystem. Because soft updates prevent most inconsistencies, the journal need only track those inconsistencies that soft updates fails to address. Specifically, the journal con-tains the information needed to recover the block and inode resources that have been freed but whose freed status failed to make it to disk before a system failure. After a crash, a variant of the venerable fsck program runs through the journal to identify and free the lost resources. Only if an inconsistency between the log and filesystem is detected is it necessary to run fsck. The jour-nal is tiny, 16Mb is usually enough independent of filesystem size. Although journal processing needs to be done before restarting, the processing time is typically just a few seconds and in the worst case a minute. It is not necessary to build a new filesystem to use soft-updates journaling. The addition or deletion of soft-updates journaling to existing fast filesystems is done using the tunefs program. 1