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
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!