You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.

I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.

I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?

Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.

  • @RustyNova
    1•1 year ago

    I’m not sure what you want from your first question. Do you want like another mount point to the directory or something else?

    Btrfs got Btrfs assistant if you want for GUI. Not a complete list of the tools, but good enough. I am still looking for a btrbk gui tool too… Or at least an interactive CLI.

    As for Btrbk, I recommend doing a root and home subvolume. Then add a hook on your package manager to snapshot root on pre unpacking. Then you can also do some other subvolumes. I put my programming, VMs, and modeling stuff in their own subvolumes, with Btrbk set on on-change. This allows only snapshoting on demand, and can be a sort of version control (even more when you tend to break your VMs with dumb shit) I think it wouldn’t be that useful for torrents tho, as they mostly just sit there, and a regular full home backup is plenty enough