Unfortunately, the tree structure used is also the weak point of [ReiserFS]: if any of it gets corrupted, chances are that much more data will be affected than under traditional [FileSystem]s. Rather than losing a single file to corruption of an inode, you may lose almost the entire contents of your disk if metadata close to the root of the [BTree] is affected. Fortunately, the likelihood of this happening due to bugs has been dramatically reduced in more recent version of the driver. Hardware failure caused corruption is still a serious problem, though. 

  

 Many people therefor don't want to trust [ReiserFS] with critical data. However, it should not be dismissed off hand. Its capabilities to handle very large directories and deal with huge numbers of tiny files very efficiently make it a prime choice for cases where performance matters and data is replacable - it is __strongly__ recommended as the foundation for a [Squid] cache or a news server.