UFS without soft updates is easily susceptible to corruption.

The "soft updates" option must be chosen when the disk is formatted for good reliability.

As I have said, 20 years ago "soft updates" in UFS worked better than journaling in the other contemporaneous file systems.

Nowadays it is likely that this is no longer true. I am still using FreeBSD in servers, but unlike 20 years ago I can afford UPSes so I no longer see often crashes due to power outages, even if I had one incident some time ago with a battery that had not been replaced yet after the UPS had warned that this is necessary, and when a power outage happened, the UPS worked for less than a minute and the power was cut before system shutdown. Even in this case there was no file system corruption on UFS.

Even with this good recent experience, today I would no longer trust UFS like 20 years ago, because it is said the current FreeBSD maintainers no longer understand the convoluted code that implements "soft updates" in UFS, and in any case most of their file system maintenance and development work is directed at ZFS now.

ZFS had its own data corruption bug some months ago. TBH, this was a big minus. You really don't expect such things from a filesystem which is in production for years and whos aim is data integrity. Now, to its defence, it is only used by FreeBSD and some nishe linux distributions, so it does not get much testing.

20 years ago is 2004, not the 90s. I don't know, but it's certainly possible that one of them was in the lead in 1995, a different one in 2005, and a different one in 2015. This is especially plausible because Linux was only created in the mid 90s, so those first few years seem likely to have been disproportionately rough.

NTFS might have been rock reliable in Windows NT and perhaps also in Windows 2000.

When Windows XP has been launched, NTFS was certainly much less reliable. Even without being affected by any crashes or other anomalies, the free space on the NTFS partitions of early Windows XP computers would shrink steadily, without any apparent cause, requiring a reformatting/reinstallation after some time.

Early Windows XP was very buggy. While a computer with Windows XP did not require one or more reboots per day like one with Windows 98, failing to reboot it for more than a few days guaranteed a crash.

Only after installing several massive service packs in the following years, Windows XP has become reasonably stable.

For me, in the 90s ext2 was much, much reliable than ntfs. After a power failure ext2 will just run fsck and fix the filesystem while ntfs will sometimes give up.

> ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then

Well, i stayed away from NTFS in the Win2000 era because crashes would make your system unusable.