I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

  • NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
  • Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
  • Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
  • xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
  • FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
  • exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

      I like ext4 because it’s easy. If anything breaks, ANY live USB can fix it. I use fat32 for my removeable drives, because anything can read it. I don’t use journalling for anything manually, but I imagine it’s useful when my disk crashes because I let my laptop die

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

      Wasn’t that the entire purpose of ext4 vs ext3? As the default, I also keep journaling on for ext4 partitions. Even /boot.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        ext3 had journaling, but not ext2. Also ext3 doesn’t really exist anymore as it was merged into the ext4 driver which can read the old format.