You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.

I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.

I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?

Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.

  • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
    3·
    7 months ago

    are there applications where zfs/btrfs is more or less appropriate than ext4 or even FAT?

    Neither of them likes to deal with very low amounts of free space, so don’t use it on places where that is often a scarcity. ZFS gets really slow when free space is almost none, and nowadays I don’t know about BTRFS but a few years ago filling the partition caused data corruption there.