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
  • Takios
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    4 months ago

    We use btrfs for the / partition and xfs for any data partitions. Has served us well, the snapshot feature saves us some valuable time when an update goes awry.

      • Takios
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        4 months ago

        The main distribution we use has it like that by default and our (admittedly rudimentary) benchmarks haven’t shown much of a performance difference versus ext4 so we kept to the default.