thingsiplay ,
@thingsiplay@beehaw.org avatar

Ext4: It's the most common used and most mature filesystem we have. You can use any rescue system without pitfalls, in case your system fails. Some other filesystems have edge cases or a special setup is required. I am not saying they are bad or so, just saying if you have to ask this question to a public forum, then it's probably more safe to just use the default Ext4 system. It's battle tested for ages.

winterayars ,

XFS. It fills the same role as ext4 but it's less likely to lose your data and that's probably the most important part of a file system. Not that ext4 is bad or anything, but XFS is good. The only downside to XFS is you can't shrink the filesystem size.

qprimed ,

agreed. EXT4 for system, XFS for everything else (mostly large VM image files). when XFS is properly configured for the underlying drive array geometry, its a nearly perfect streamlined FS.

RustyNova ,

I don't know what's the brand neW meta pick, but at least BTRFS over Ext4. BTRFS is just more stable and less corruptable than Ext4. Heck, fedora changed to it as default

8osm3rka , (edited )

To be fair, Fedora switching to something as default isn't a good sign that you should start using it. I do agree, though, btrfs has come far enough to be a default choice for most people.

swooosh ,

What did fedora adopt that wasn't a good choice in hindsight?

qaz ,

PulseAudio?

communist ,
@communist@beehaw.org avatar

I use f2fs on ssd's and ext4 on hdd's

I don't see the need for snapshots, I backup externally

toastal ,

SSDs* HDDs*

f2fs does one of the weirdest things with compression by default: the files are compressed but they still take up the same amount of blocks as the uncompressed files. This can get you the slight performance boost of compressed files, but doesn’t actually save you space which is an odd choice. You can enable a flag in the kernel but it has other effects as well.

NotAnArdvark ,

f2fs doesn't track file creation times. I thought I was ok with this, but, the longer I used it the more places it started to become an issue. Now I have all these notes that were created in 1970 and it just really takes away a powerful way of searching and organizing my notes.

jsh ,

I always go LVM + BTRFS these days. I simply love the versatility.

refreeze ,
@refreeze@lemmy.world avatar

I'm curious, why do you use LVM with BTRFS and not just use BTRFS built in subvolumes?

jsh ,

Because I'm stupid and like to run my partitions across multiple drives. 😅

nialv7 , (edited )

Well since so many people recommend btrfs because "it have never lost any data for me". I want to suggest OP to never use btrfs ever. Because it has lost my data, at least three separate times, the most recent time a week ago. And it's not because of a power loss or anything, it just corrupted my files for absolutely no reason at all.

Stay away from btrfs at all costs.

VHS ,
@VHS@hexbear.net avatar

I've always used XFS on spinning drives and F2FS on SSDs. No issues, they're very solid

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

1000002341

Just a heads up if your SSD has issues or you lose power your data is gone

secret300 ,

I like btrfs but only cause it got transparent compression. I don't need the extra disk space and it only helps a bit but I just think it's neat

ta00000 ,

If you're on spinning rust with a modern CPU, compression actually helps your read/write speeds quite a bit. It's faster for the CPU to compress/decompress then read/write less data because hard drives are so slow in comparison.

secret300 ,

Even more neat

Frederic ,

I used ext4 for yeeeeaaaarrssss but now I'm using LUKS+btrfs, stable, encrypted.

intelisense ,

BTRFS for the OS partitions, ext4 for /home, tmpfs for /tmp. I rarely need to use snapshots, but I do use a rolling release. It's one of those things you don't need until you really fucking NEED it. Tumbleweed support is great - I can roll back a bad update in about as long as it takes to reboot.

Evil_Shrubbery ,

This is exactly how and what Im using.

Home and other ext4 are backed up one form or another on by NAS.

taanegl ,
@taanegl@beehaw.org avatar

Seeing that user Flatpaks are installed in the home folder, I see this as an interesting strategy. EXT4 still beats BTRFS in certain read/write benchmarks. My only problem being that you lose provisioning.

I don't see a lot of people talking about this here, but BTRFS subvolume provisioning is probably the best reason to use BTRFS - and BCacheFS - not just CoW or snapshotting.

The old way, of having a set beginning and end of a partition, is like caveman technology to me now. Subvolumes are here to stay and I am happy about that.

If I need to do a little distrohop now, even though I wouldn't (rpm-ostree rebase go brrrr), all I'd do is delete an recreate the "@" subvolume (or the root subvolume) without touching another partition or subvolume. All storage space is shared between subvolumes, basically, removing that boundary distinction between them, so I get to keep the files, permissions and meta data in my "@home" and my "@var" subvolumes, even though I get rid of the old "@" to replace it with a new one.

Therefore the idea of having storage that is reliant upon partitioning, ordering sectors one after another, having to defragment and keep strict separations between them is absolutely archaic to me. I'll gladly take a slight performance hit just for the convenience of avoiding all that.

wargreymon2023 ,

FS is for nubz, do these instead:

Read

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/stdout

Write

dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sda
Samsy ,

I prefer ext4 on HDD and f2fs on flash devices.

Scribbd ,

Also taking f2fs for a spin.

As far as I have experienced (I didn't measure this): don't use that partition for container layers. It might just be my system, but f2fs has slowed my container engine down a bit.

Samsy ,

I excactly doing this. I run coreOS with f2fs and it runs really fast. No issues so far.

Scribbd ,

Totally accepting it is my system being slow. It is a openwrt router after all.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

exFAT is best for removable drives.

Samsy ,

For interoperability, yes. But with flash devices I mean ssd and nvme.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

If you are using the drive between Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android, exFAT is going to be the supreme choice. It is what I use for flash sticks and external HDDs.

Maoo ,
@Maoo@hexbear.net avatar

ext4 for system partitions and zfs for anything dedicated to personal data storage.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

The problem with ZFS is that it breaks if you change versions.

boredsquirrel , (edited )

BTRFS is not more performant than EXT4.

I personally dont use any features of BTRFS manually though, as Fedora Kinoite does that for me.

atzanteol ,

Note that ext4 is damn old and thus also not as performant as more modern ones like btrfs or bcachefs

This is not true. BTRFS has more features but ext4 is very performant. They're both similar enough that I promise you that you wouldn't notice unless you had some very specific use-case that needed to be performance tuned.

What do you think "being old" has to do with performance?

boredsquirrel ,

What do you think "being old" has to do with performance?

Being tailored to NVMEs or SATA SSDs instead of to HDDs and similar. But I am not sure about which one would be better here.

Phoronix Benchmark so we have something to look at

BTRFS seems to be better at multithreading, being outperformed by F2FS (which I forgot to mention, it is used on Android and I would call that damn stable).

Actually, F2FS seems to be a really good replacement for EXT4, being top in most tests, while having no journaling, while BTRFS in fact worked pretty badly!

atzanteol ,

Right, your claim that ext4 "isn't performant because it's old" is crap.

lemmyreader ,

Note that ext4 is damn old

Hmm ? Linux kernel is way older than ext4. And before ext4 there was ext3 and ext2. Linux users also have the choice of using XFS file system and for IT persons working for corporations XFS can have some advantages. Let's see, XFS was born in 1993.

more modern ones like btrfs or bcachefs

Years ago I thought that bcachecfs looked interesting but last thing I read about it this year was not very promising regarding reliability. Not sure whether it was in comments on Lemmy but here I found something from Linus himself : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs#Stability

jcarax ,

Yeah, bcachefs is still very very young, and not ready for much of anything beyond tinkering. But I'm definitely excited to have a native filesystem that's designed with tiers in mind.

Corgana , (edited )
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

2008 is not "damn old" in terms of filesystems.

jcarax ,

It is 16 years ago, that's pretty old in terms of technology.

It's also an evolution of ex3 and ext2, and ext if you want to consider it's very short lifetime. In fact, the lead developer stated in 2008 that it was meant as a stop gap, as it's based on old technology with some new features, and that BTRFS was the future.

You999 ,

Exactly especially when the default file system on windows is 30 years old.

You999 ,

ETX4 was released in 2006 and BTRFS was released in 2007.

SaltyIceteaMaker ,

So i normally go with ext4, however windows can't really access ext4 drives so you'd need to find a file system that both support if you want to access the drive/partition from windows. My drive with all the games is ntfs for example which works in Windows and Linux. (At least for normal storage, idk if you can boot linux from it although i wouldn't see why not)

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

NTFS can't handle Linux file permissions. It is not suited as a system drive.

And supposedly it can give you problems if you use it to store your Steam games. I never cared to test that, though.

thingsiplay ,
@thingsiplay@beehaw.org avatar

I was always wondering if there could be a small Linux partition for additional information of NTFS partitions, like meta data stored as a separate file (or database). And off course it would need some virtualization layer like WINE does for the file path mapping. Then it would be possible to use NTFS as system drive and for games.

Obviously this would be problematic and performance wouldn't be great either (assuming), and it would complicate things for end user and developers too. But I was always thinking if this would be possible.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

NTFS can handle Linux permissions perfectly. In fact, many Linux filesystems lack the kind of permissions that NTFS does support, not the other way around. FAT doesn't do permissions, but NTFS has supported decent ("extended" for Linux filesystems) permissions since the mid 90s, i believe even since before Linux even existed.

The NTFS driver on Linux isn't very good or fast, so I'd avoid NTFS for a system drive for sure, but as a filesystem, NTFS is fine. It also doesn't help that many distros don't ship the modern NTFS driver in the kernel, so booting off NTFS doesn't work in many cases.

SaltyIceteaMaker ,

It works well enough for my game drive. At least i have yet to encounter any problem

bloodfart ,

Wsl2 lets windows do ext4

SteveTech ,

There's also an open source BTRFS driver for Windows.

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