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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
voracread ,

I tried exFAT for my USB stick but car sterio cannot read it.

scottmeme ,

ZFS, got 5 system with different zpools

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

On root?

ryannathans ,

Mine is

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*

wazzupdog ,

Depends on the device and the use case, mostly FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, EXT4

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

ext4, but the btrfs activity visible in the kernel changelog has slowed down recently after a long period of many bug fixes, so maybe I'll give it a try next time.

thingsiplay ,

same

ampersandcastles ,

My regular computer is ext4.

I assume my raspberry pi is ext4, but I’ve never checked what DietPi runs as default. It works fine.

My 720xd is ext4 on the OS drives, but the storage drives are ZFS with dual parity.

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Ext4 is the only good FS so that’s what I use.

henfredemars ,

Many different file systems are successfully used in production on a large scale that aren’t EXT4.

avidamoeba , (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Ext4 and ZFS.

  • Ext4 for system disks because it’s default in OS installers and it works well. I typically use it on top of LVMRAID (LVM-managed mdraid) for redundancy and expansion flexibility.
  • ZFS for storage because it’s got data integrity verification, trivial setup, flexible redundancy topologies, free snapshots, blazing fast replication, easy expansion, incredible flexibility in separating data and performance tuning within the same filesystem. I’d be looking into setting up ZFS on root for my next machine. Among other things that would enable trivial and blazing fast backup of the system while it’s running - as simple as syncoid -r rpool backup-server:machine4-rpool.
xilliah ,

Thank you little amoeba 🦠

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

biased random walk dance

cmnybo ,

Most of my drives are EXT4, but I started using BTRFS a couple years ago and will be using it on all new installs from now on. I really like being able to make snapshots and compression reduces the install size quite a bit.

falkerie71 ,
@falkerie71@sh.itjust.works avatar

Every photocopy machine I’ve come across that accept USB sticks do not support exFAT, so what I would do with my USB stick is to split it into two partitions, one FAT32 and the rest exFAT.

Darkassassin07 ,
@Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca avatar

I wish I’d actually chosen a file system instead of just letting window’s at the time default to NTFS for external drives.

Moving from Windows to Debian; NTFS has been nothing but a headache. I’ve actually had to setup a windows machine to serve that drive pool via SAMBA as Linux just won’t play nicely with it.

Shimitar ,

Ext4 on every Linux device.

Ah i dont have any other kind of devices (android on mobile, but there I have no choices on fs)

Why not btrfs? Don’t know, been using what has kept working flawlessly for me for the last 20+ years, no need to replace ext4.

fossphi ,

Btrfs, for the compression and CoW. I’ve been using it since a couple years. It seems stable for my use. I need to fully wrap my head around how snapshots work, though.

henfredemars ,

You mentioned CoW. I’m really taking advantage of this because I have multiple Wine prefixes that have lots of duplicate data. I want to give every application it’s own prefix, and my underlying file system allows me to duplicate the blocks so the prefixes are basically free where before it’s several hundred megabytes just to make a new prefix.

CalcProgrammer1 ,
@CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml avatar

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

thingsiplay ,

Ext4 for everything when possible, because its reliable and proven. I’m looking towards Btrfs for my next system drive, as it is mature now and has good features. But I would use Ext4 for everything else still. For interoperability that doesn’t understand Ext4 it would be NTFS when supported, otherwise fallback to FAT32.

That’s the entirety of my knowledge and what I use when I have to format it myself. :D

henfredemars ,

I respect your reliable and proven comment. I really love the features of BTRFS and that’s why I use it, but I also really care about my data. I have secondary installations that use EXT4 and work very well.

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.

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