fsck Recovery From Crashes

[Jay Ts]

I have a few questions regarding fsck and crash recovery that I have not
been able to learn the answers to from TFM or my own experience:

1.  When the system is booting after a crash, and fsck runs and reports
that it has cleared an inode, am I guaranteed that if it belonged to a
"real" file, that the file will be placed in the lost+found directory?

2.  When I run

	cd lost+found
	file * 

file may report that some of the entries are "directories".  What does
this mean?  If a file is "empty", does this mean that its contents were
lost, or that it was empty before the crash (or is it undeterminable?).

What I am really looking for is the answer to THIS:

3.  Is it possible to *completely* recover a filesystem after a crash, when
    fsck has modified the filesystem (other than when it simply sets its
    state to "OK", that is)?  If so, how?

... or should I just continue to reinstall the operating system from
scratch and backup tapes, as I have been doing?

What prompts this query is that I keep running into new clients' UNIX
systems that have been running for months or years with files in the
lost+found directories on one or more filesystem partitions, with apparently
no loss in functionality.  Is it ok to just let them go like that?

Opinions accepted, but please document them as such!

Jay Ts, Director
Metran Technology
uunet!pdn!tscs!metran!jay