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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
ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

Btrfs, because I’ve heard good things.

possiblylinux127 ,

It is very hard to corrupt

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Same

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

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!

seaQueue , (edited )
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

Btrfs, ZFS and ext4. My servers use ZFS, my client machines mostly use btrfs and I have a sprinkling of ext4 partitions for specific workloads. I’m all in on CoW filesystems for snapshots, send receive, transparent compression and reflinks. I like btrfs on client machines and SBCs because it’s easily available (baked into the kernel) and doesn’t require maintaining dkms or holding kernel versions until ZFS supports them and because snapshot handling and other filesystem admin tasks are simple and straightforward. I run ZFS wherever data integrity is important, eg: storage servers and backup targets, but largely prefer working with btrfs.

soundconjurer ,
@soundconjurer@mstdn.social avatar

@Psyhackological
Work stations all run Ext4.
Main server: Ext4 on main partition, ZFS RAIDZ2 on the data.
Secondary server: BTRFS on main, BTRFS RAID1 on data.

If BTRFS could natively encrypt and had stable RAID6, I'd be using it probably on everything.

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

F2FS, because solid state and speed

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Oh never heard of it. How’s your environment suited for it then? Give some details please.

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

not sure what you want to know…

  1. have a solid state drive
  2. format it as f2fs

done; just use it normally

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Do you use it for USBs NVMe and SSDs or SSDs exclusive on the main system?

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

FAT32 for USBs, as I frequently need them to be bootable.

F2FS for my M.2 NVMes, desktop and laptop, but would also use it on SSDs as they’re all flash.

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.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

…and that’s why Oracle fucked up the licensing on it. We are not allowed to have nice things.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Why though? AFAIK the CDDL totally allows us to have nice things. It’s similar to MPL and considered a free software license by the FSF. Sure it’s not GPL but it doesn’t disallow us from changing ZFS, using it, even commercially.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

I didn’t mean the license. I meant, it was a “fuck you” from Oracle.

ryannathans ,

I don’t really understand why the linux community complains about the licencing. I’m sure openzfs overcame that. In the freebsd world it’s native on root straight out of the box

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah there’s no essential problems with it in itself as free open source software. Legally it doesn’t seem compatible with the Linux kernel source code, as in you can’t compile it into the kernel but it seems to be okay to load it as a binary module, prebuilt or built on demand.

ryannathans ,

Yet practically no distros support in out of the box

And on root? Can practically forget it

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Well Ubuntu is the most popular distro and it supports it out of the box. It’s had experimental ZFS-on-root support since 2020. Unfortunately it needs more work to be to be promoted from experimental status. But yeah, I don’t know of any other diatros supporting it on root out of the box. Which is sad.

ghjones ,

I feel your pain on the CDDL (although I think it is still considered a “free” license), and while I love to hate Oracle, I think the CDDL decision was originally Sun’s, even if Oracle could “free” it now to be GPL.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

I don’t ‘love’ to ‘hate’ Oracle. For much of my career it seems like they’ve gone out of their way to make things more difficult than they need to be. If I had to calculate how much time fighting with their projects cost me (compared to everything else), they’d be at the head of the list (with one more zero at the left of the decimal point than Microsoft).

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Holy xfs is probably not close to that?

non_burglar ,

XFS is simply a journalling filesystem.

ZFS is a COW filesystem and volume manager with compression, block management, and an adaptive read cache.

Kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

theroff ,

Technically XFS is also a CoW filesystem, but it doesn’t have the vast array of features that ZFS does like volume management, snapshots, send/recv etc. It does have reflink support which I guess is a kind of snapshot for a file.

youRFate ,

Well, encryption is very much not a strong point of zfs. I agree on all other points tho.

ScottE ,

Actually native encryption has been a feature of ZFS for a few years now. It’s nice not having to have an extra LUKS layer.

ghjones ,

Yeah, but it’s had some actual data corruption bugs related to sending encrypted snapshots (off the top of my head).

ryannathans ,

Not really bugs, the process for zfs send differs with encrypted snapshots. Make sure you consult the docs. Always test your backups to make sure you cloned properly

Ooops ,
@Ooops@feddit.org avatar

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

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Which RAID? I need to read about SystemD encrypt hooks because I know nothing. Also why not LVM? Is btrfs more flexible in partitioning when you want to extend it or shrink it? I heard that you can merge “partitions” on 2 different disks so they are visisble under one mount point.

Ooops ,
@Ooops@feddit.org avatar

Btrfs can mostly fo everything you would normaly use LVN or raid for natively.

Btrfs raid0 lets you combine any number of differently sized drives into one (just without the speed boost of traditional raid0 because with flexible drive sizes data is not symmetrical striped). And btrfs raid1 keeps every data duplicated, again with flexible number and sizes of drive (also with metadata on every drive).

The sytemd hooks (instead of the traditional busybox ones) then manage the one other task you use LVM for: unlocking multiple partitons (for example multiple raid partitons and swap) with just one password. Because the systemd encrypt function tries unlooking all luks partitions it finds with the first password provided and only asks for passwords for each partition if that doesn’t work.

PS: btrfs subvolumes are already flexible in size and don’t need predefined sizes. So the only things that need to be created separately are non-btrfs stuff like the efi system partition or a physical swap (which you can also skip by using a swap file instead of a partition).

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.

mat ,
@mat@linux.community avatar

Yeah, I did find the page, but it assumes you’re doing a command line install whilst I was using the graphical installer. Now that I know more about Nix I think I should’ve gone for a CLI install, but I don’t know if I will stick with it due to the themeing issues.

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

I always forget that they added a graphical installer, but IMO it kinda defeats the point of having a declarative config file setup your system.

What issues are you having with Qt themes?

mat ,
@mat@linux.community avatar

Agreed! I wonder how it will work if I have to reinstall, I guess I git clone my flake from the install CD and use that instead.

For Qt themes, I had Catppuccin working on Arch but I haven’t found a way to apply it. I tried Stylix (kde.enable = true does nothing for Dolphin or nheko), the official Catppuccin flake (dropped GTK support, sets QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE which breaks nheko). I know it’s possible to theme Qt apps because I’ve had it working before, but I can’t find any info on how to do it with NixOS that works…

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

Did qt5ct/qt6ct not work for you? There’s also Kvantum support.

mat ,
@mat@linux.community avatar

Is there a way to set catppuccin as the qt5ct theme? I tried manually adding the files but using qt5ct breaks all icons in Dolphin (it displays alt text or nothing), and kind-of applies in nheko but leaves the main window background fully white.

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

You just download and put the theme files where it tells you to (and in the qt6ct folder too) and set the theme (and icon theme) in the app. Icons breaking is interesting; I just installed Dolphin and it had no problem using my icon theme. Does PCManFM-Qt also have this issue for you?

mat ,
@mat@linux.community avatar

I tried this and was able to set a colorscheme in qt5/6ct that stuck in nheko (with QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct), but it still has the same icons issue in Dolphin. pcmanfm-qt also has the icons missing.

OneRedFox ,
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org avatar

Did you manually set the icon theme in qt5ct/qt6ct? I recall having to do that on a fresh install.

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.

Empricorn ,

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but have you tried using gParted? GUI, new-user friendly, easy to visualize your system, I’ve used it for over a decade on multiple devices…

ChickenPasaran ,
@ChickenPasaran@piefed.social avatar

Actually, I was using gparted yesterday! I was trying to format a USB drive to exFAT but the option was greyed out, so either gparted doesn't have support for formatting in exFAT or I needed an optional dependency.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

When you know LVM I think you can manage manual paritioning. :) Especially as btrfs is advertised with snapshots so trial and error is encouraged.

PoopMonster ,

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

lemmyvore ,

Depends on the distro, some have started to offer btrfs by default.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Do lsblk -f and you will know for /home or / partitions. But probably yeah. However Fedora uses btrfs as default now so depends on the distro.

Magister ,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

Btrfs in a luks container so it’s encrypted.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Great! Have you had any issues with this setup?

Magister ,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

nope, it works really well, for more than a year now, this is my work PC using 8h/day, I’m using MX23 AHS version. Directly in the setup you can select encryption and btrfs volume etc. btrfs is pretty stable.

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.

Kualk ,

Take snapshot. If problem occurs, manually change boot label to use snapshot label.

nobleshift ,
@nobleshift@lemmy.world avatar

ZFS

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

I see it’s the GOAT as fs

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.

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.

marty_relaxes ,

Additionally, at least for my use-case btrfs benefits me since it is less picky about drive sizes being the same and duplicating everything correctly - letting you essentially just throw additional storage at it as you acquire it.

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.

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