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What file systems are you using on your devices and why?

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
eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

F2FS, because solid state and speed

ryannathans ,

ZFS where possible for maximum reliability

It also has self healing, no “partitions”, high performance, compression, smart drive redundancy without RAID holes, encryption, deduplication and an extremery intelligent cache called ARC

Ooops ,
@Ooops@feddit.org avatar

BTRFS raid on LUKS-encrypted devices (no LVM, all unlocked with one password via SystemD encrypt hooks).

mat ,
@mat@linux.community avatar

Honestly I saw btrfs in the arch install guide and read about it because I thought the name sounded funny. I used it until I distro hopped to NixOS couldn’t figure out how to install it with btrfs, so I’m back on ext4.

Maybe I’ll give it another try next hop, which is likely soon since Qt theming seems impossible on Nix. :/

ChickenPasaran ,
@ChickenPasaran@piefed.social avatar

Ext4 with LVM.

I like BTRFS and it's features but sadly Debian doesn't have a preset for it in it's installer so the only way to use it is to manually partition and I absolutely suck at that.

PoopMonster ,

Whatever my installation CD had as default 😂. I’m guessing ext4?

Magister ,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

Btrfs in a luks container so it’s encrypted.

mayidar ,

I use Btrfs for my root partition to be able to rollback if something goes wrong after update. XFS: in all other cases, since I hate the lost+found directory on ext4. Although I don’t think there’s any significant difference between ext4 and xfs in performance and reliability.

cyborganism ,

I’m curious now about BTRFS.

How do you roll back in case of problems?

mayidar ,

discovery.endeavouros.com/…/02/

Basically, I just followed this tutorial for my EndeavourOS installations. It’s as easy as choosing an older entry in GRUB. Fedora offers something similar by default, and I think Tumbleweed does too.

Moreover I’m now playing with Arkane Linux (arkanelinux.org), immutable flavour of Arch, it features another magic with btrfs and rollbacks without snapshots and GRUB

Zikeji ,
@Zikeji@programming.dev avatar

Bookmarking Arkane. I’m a huge fan of Fedora Atomic but miss AUR.

cyborganism ,

Oh ok cool! I’m going to check it out.

I’m taking a lot of notes for my next install. Trying to build something solid with Kubuntu.

nobleshift ,
@nobleshift@lemmy.world avatar

ZFS

rjek ,

ext4 because I value my data and don’t want to lose it. I used to mess about with ZFS for mass storage but it’s a university course to learn how to use and have decent performance.

I used to use XFS, but ext4 caught up.

And I used to use XFS… on something other than Linux.

gerdesj ,

xfs has reflinks. That means you can copy huge wodges of data nearly for free on one filesystem. For backup systems this is a killer feature. Veeam rolling up incremental backups into the last full happens in seconds because pointers to blocks are juggled around rather than the data blocks themselves.

xfs has been around for a very, very long time. I use it for larger filesystems eg Nextcloud, Zoneminder and the like (and Veeam backup repos that are not object storage). I use ext4 by default.

pfSense boxes - zfs because the alternative is ufs.

RPi - OverlayFS (with ext4 and tmpfs) gets you a generally read only filesystem with changes held in RAM. Ideal for kiosks, appliances and keeping memory sticks alive.

Windows - NTFS, it works well and has streams and there aren’t many other options (ReFS is a bit new but it does have reflinks)

henfredemars , (edited )

I care a lot about filesystems.

BTRFS in FS-managed RAID configuration for automatic self-healing and snapshots for instant automated backups (though I keep a traditional backup too for protection against bugs and user error).

Storage is cheap compared to how much I value my data. BTRFS has very good support on Linux, integration with some backup tools, and I really want to use a FS that has full data checksums to make sure the data stays correct at rest. I like that I don’t have to use equal sized drives and can use whatever I have available, though I would appreciate a better read distribution model rather than the current where it just chooses a random drive to read from when multiple copies are available.

Disadvantages include difficulty accessing from Windows in my experience, less than stellar performance on HDDs, not very space efficient for small files systems because of the bulky metadata, and some uncommon RAID types don’t work correctly and will eat your data. I also don’t recommend it for use over USB because many such devices don’t correctly implement sync, and this is very important to stay on the correct transaction number and prevent file system inconsistencies. If I had to boot from USB, I wouldn’t pick BTRFS.

I don’t think exFAT or FAT32 offer POSIX permissions. I’m not sure if you could have a root file system there.

whostosay ,

|I care a lot about filesystems.

Damn bro, I didn’t think I was gonna cum in /linux

_thebrain_ ,

Have you seen/tried github.com/maharmstone/btrfs ?

I have heard it is decent but have never had a need to try it.

Kaeru ,

Xfs is solid Commenting b/c I’m disappointed no one else recommends

shotgun_crab ,

Btrfs for the compression and snapshots

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

BTRFS on Linux (including the SD card in my Steam Deck, dunno what the root storage on that uses). NTFS on Windows (BTRFS driver for Windows isn’t quite as stable as I’d like it to be). ZFS on a NAS because that’s how it came set up and so far the zRAID hasn’t failed me yet. FAT32 for UEFI boot partitions and recovery USB drives.

XFS at work because apparently ext4 isn’t “mature enough”. Not by choice.

No idea what Android uses, probably ext4 with some software on top?

rem26_art ,
@rem26_art@fedia.io avatar

I've got Btrfs on my desktop for the OS drive cuz that was what Fedora recommended when I was installing it. It took a bit of effort to get snapshots working properly, but other than that, I've had no issues with it at all over the past year. I've got an exFAT drive and an NTFS drive in there that are kind of leftovers from using Windows. I've been thinking about reformatting the exFAT drive to ext4 or something, since all it really does is store games, and having the ability to symlink to it would be nice.

I've got a TrueNAS machine as well and that uses ZFS for pretty much everything.

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