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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
wazzupdog ,

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

teawrecks ,

Not only is there btrfs support for Windows, but since windows and linux root structures don’t conflict, someone got both arch and windows booting from the same partition. Is it a good idea? Hell no. But can it be done? Apparently yes.

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)

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?

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.

Jesus_666 ,

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

CalcProgrammer1 ,
@CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml avatar

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

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.

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.

voracread ,

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

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