Handling power off with no shutdown

In my system i've mounted the whole thing readonly, and only if i have to
write something to the disk (or in my case a cf-card) i have to remount it
in rw-mode, then i write, then i remount it in ro-mode again. All the
temporary stuff which linux will write goes into a ramdisk, so per
example /var is mounted in a ramdisk. In this way you can minimize the
writings.

This is maybe not the best way, but for me it works.

hth, Jens

If nothing is written to the disk it can be mounted as read-only.

If the system writes to the disk at random times the only way is to add
a battery to provide power to do a shut down when power is switched off.

Using a journalling file system reduced the boot time after a not clean
shout down and enables a cleaner remounting of a not cleanly dismounted
partition, but increases the risk of interrupting a write cycles as a
lot more writes are done with a single transaction. So it's not
recommended when using some kind of flash instead of a disk.

-Michael