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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
ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

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

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”.

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

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

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.

possiblylinux127 ,

Defaults

So Btrfs, ZFS and ext4 for virtual

mindbleach ,

NTFS for the drive I had before jumping to Mint. Currently reporting several hundred gigabytes free, but refusing to make any new files, because… I don’t know. I’ll deal with it after an upcoming move.

The OS / home SSD is ext4, and so is the fat loud hard disk I recently purchased through an entire month of fighting Amazon over gift cards.

HarriPotero ,
@HarriPotero@lemmy.world avatar

Been running BTRFS since 2010. Ext2/3/4 before that.

Using it for CoW, de-duplication, compression. My home file server has had a long-lived array of mis-matched devices. Started at 4x2TB, through 6x4TB and now 2x18+4TB. I just move up a size whenever a disk fails.

possiblylinux127 ,

Btrfs isn’t stable in big configurations. The big issue is that resilvering takes a long time and hurts performance. ZFS is the right answer.

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.

MoogleMaestro ,

I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.

It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.

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.

n2burns ,

It’s all Ext4, but I run SnapRAID on top of that on my data drives. I’m sure lots of people would tell me I should use ZFS/BTRFS instead, but I’m used to SnapRAID, and I like the idea if something goes wrong, I won’t lose all my data.

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