There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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
kittenroar ,

Just ext4 on my Linux things; I got scared away from btrfs because of some file loss horror stories

possiblylinux127 ,

Ext4 is prone to corruption as it doesn’t have much error detection. Whatever you do don’t lose power.

thingsiplay ,

Ext4 is prone to corruption as it doesn’t have much error detection. Whatever you do don’t lose power.

I use Ext4 since 20 years in all of my systems. And I had my fair share of power loses. It’s not a problem as you describe, because Ext4 is journaling. Ext4 is robust and one should not worry to lose data randomly.

Quote from: www.pcmag.com/…/journaling-file-system

A file system that contains its own recovery capability in the event of a failure. In a journaling file system, the information about the changes is recorded in a separate log (the journal) before the indexes to the files are updated. If a power or other system failure corrupts the indexes as they are being rewritten, the operating system can use the log to repair them when the computer is restarted.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

ZFS on anything storage related. Enterprise level snapshot and replica management.

wargreymon ,

Google cloud storage, copilot my files with Microsoft, crowdstrike running in background for better security.

IsoSpandy ,

Apple chastity cage to prevent me from being tempted by Linux. /s

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

ExFAT is the LCD filesystem for flash sticks. FAT32 is the filesystem that you have to use for devices designed before Microsoft was awful about Exfat licensing.

Everywhere else, Btrfs. If Oracle didn’t poison-pill ZFS licensing and it was common on Linux, I would be using that instead. Basically, taking it on faith that a drive didn’t fuck up your data is crazy. The most basic responsibility for a filesystem should be ensuring that “the files come out exactly the same as when they went in”.

sgibson5150 ,

Random thoughts, no particular order

I think btrfs was the default the last time I installed Bazzite, but I don’t really know anything about it so I switched it to ext4. I understand the snapshot ability is nice with rolling release distros, though.

It’d been ages since I’d used FAT32 for anything until I made a Debian live USB when I was setting up my pi-hole on an old Core2Duo recently. It would only boot on FAT32 for reasons I probably once knew. 😆

NTFS was an improvement over the FATs what with the journaling, security, file streams, etc. I use it wherever I still use Windows (work).

Most of my general purpose USB flash drives use exFAT. I like not having to worry about eject/unmount.

Jesus_666 ,

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

By default, windows does “Fast Boot” which doesn’t make booting any faster, but does have the benefit of leaving the volume in a mounted state when you shut it down.

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.

henfredemars ,

Yes I have and it caused file system corruption the two times I tried it. Something wasn’t quite right.

_thebrain_ ,

Good to know. I know a couple of people in the steam deck world who dual boot windows and steamos and have their games on a btrfs partition that use it so they don’t need games installed twice … I have no desire to do this so I have never tried.

henfredemars ,

It’s possible I was just unlucky, but data corruption makes it harder for me to sleep at night. I choose to be a little more conservative and consider that tool beta quality.

Telorand ,

So, genuine question: why btrfs instead of zfs? Sounds like your use case would fit the latter.

Kualk ,

BTRFS is zero effort on root, because it is included in kernel. ZFS on root is extra effort at least on Arch, due to licensing restrictions.

henfredemars ,

Does ZFS handle data duplication on unequal sized volumes or heterogeneous pools? I don’t believe so, and BTRFS was a first class installer option.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Every year I buy a couple ~$5 USB drives and plug them into my jbod machine in a software raid1. At this point there’s about a hundred in long array of daisy chained USB hubs.

Each drive is formatted with fat32 and added to an LVM. Don’t judge my ghetto NAS.

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

ext4 because its the default and works fine

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. :/

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

You should give the wiki instructions a read if you haven’t already.

scottmeme ,

ZFS, got 5 system with different zpools

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

On root?

ryannathans ,

Mine is

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Manual setup?

scottmeme ,

I do have 1 system with ZFS mirror boot drives

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Did you use an installer to do it or manual setup?

scottmeme ,

Proxmox install on the zfs mirror boot plus some other pools, everything else is currently truenas single boot drive with pools

I do have other proxmox stuff running zfs*

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

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

ZFS is completely ridiculous. It’s like someone actually sat down to design an intelligent filesystem instead of making a slightly improved version of what’s already out there.

ssm , (edited )
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Edit: reasons added in because I can’t read the post title

  • OpenBSD laptop: ffs2, vfat for efi system partition
    • Why: Contrary to popular belief, OpenBSD does not support zfs. The only other filesystem options are msdos (fat family), and ext2fs (mostly for Linux compatibility as far as I can tell, filesystem is experimental and lacks a bunch of features according to the manpage). Makes ffs2 the only sane option.
  • OpenBSD vps: ffs2
    • Why: See above.
  • Pinephone running PmOS: ext2 boot partition, ext4 root partition
    • Why: Defaults.
  • Void Linux VM: ext2
    • Why: I prefer not having journaling on flash memory. This hasn’t bitten me in the ass too hard yet, and even when it does I can usually get around system files being lost with integrity tools. Maybe I’ll dabble with f2fs some day, but I’ll need to read about its features and shortcomings compared to ext2.
  • Alpine Linux VM: ext4
    • Why: Would have installed as ext2 as well, but I forgot
  • Steam Deck: ??? (too lazy to check, 9/10 chance it’s ext4)
loutr ,
@loutr@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yes the Steam deck FS is ext4.

Why ext2 on Void?

ssm ,
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I prefer not using journaling filesystems on flash memory, I haven’t had any major data integrity issues yet because of it. I would have made the Alpine fs ext2 as well, but I guess I missed it during install. I think you can just disable journaling in ext4 anyways, so if I care enough I’ll just do that.

nickiam2 ,

I use ext4 for all boot drives and root filesystems. Anything really important goes on a ZFS array. And for my Linux isos, I use a drive with ext4 + snapraid. The parity drive has xfs because ext4 has a 16tb file size limit.

Got rid of anything NTFS as it was unreliable and slow on Linux.

featured ,

ZFS for my server’s root pool and main storage pool. Ext4 with snapraid for my media pool. Currently btrfs on my desktop and ext4 under vanillaos on my laptop (not sure if I could partition it manually to use btrfs but I’m considering that for snapshots)

doubletwist ,

XFS on my server VMs and my laptops and desktops.

ZFS on my file server. I’d use it on my laptops and desktops too (and have done when I was using Xubuntu) but I’ve switched toFedora which doesn’t come with a way to easily install with ZFS and I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to get it done. And I can’t stand btrfs. I don’t know what it is about it, but I just don’t like it.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •