Indeed, fsck is quite efficient in recovering from errors of several file systems, but it sometimes requires placing the file system offline and either walking through the disk to check for errors, or poking the super block for an error status. Therefore, the approach taken by the existing monitoring tools was to either watch the kernel log, which is a risky business, since it might be wrapped by newer messages, or to query file system specific sysfs files, which register the last error. Soon enough, we will have better file system error monitoring tools on data centers, and also on our Linux desktops.