fsck fails/lost+found questions

[Eric Thelin]

I have a machine running a database that has crashed a number of times
due to flaky power/UPS issues.  I know this is VERY bad and have since
fixed it.  But that is not the point that I have a question about.
Every time this machine crashed it would fail the fsck on startup to the
point that I had to login and run fsck manually.  When running manually
I get asked a lot of questions about deleting duplicate inodes and
inodes with bad times (or something like that it has been a long time).
Because I didn't know what else to do I just went with the default which
was always Y.  After a while I went started adding a -y which just
answers Y and doesn't even ask.  So now the big question that I have is
what dammage has been gettin done and is there anything that can done
about it?  Other than the obvious don't let the power fail or run a
journaling filesystem.  I now have thousands of entries in my lost+found
directory that I assume came from these filesystem scans as some kind of
safety net.  But what could I do with them?  If there is no way for a
mere mortal to use them is it safe to delete them?  They have seemingly
random permissions, ownership, and timestamps so I am vary scared to do
anything with them.  My guess is that they are essentially hard links to
the block that was dammaged.  But I am certainly no fs hacker and I have
never seen any documentation explaining lost+found or what to do with
it.  Any help would be great and probably enlightening to many people on
this list.

Eric Thelin
aztechbiz.com