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
  • SavvyWolf
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    3 months ago

    I’ve been basically using btrfs on a lot of my disks because of the features it has.

    Before I switched to a borg based system, my backups partition used btrfs for compression.

    My main OS disk is btrfs so I can use timeshift snapshots, which are really worth checking out if you tinker with your system a lot.

    I have two more btrfs partitions software raid0’d together for my steam library, nix store and other big but loosable things.

    And my main home folder uses btrfs because I think the checksumming thing it does is more reliable for error detection, and cow is more fault tollerant on power failure?

    … And I now fell like I’m one of those people with an over engineered storage solution. I just never get rid of old ssds or hard disks!