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.

  • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
    16·
    9 months ago

    And if a copied file is changed, btrfs only stores the difference instead of two complete files. E.g. if the 1GB file1 is copied to file2, they will take 1GB total. If 100MB is appended to file2, the total storage usage is 1,1GB

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      10·
      9 months ago

      It should be noted that you can (and should) turn this off for certain workloads. I’ve deduplicated VM images in the past and that sure saves a lot of space, but write performance drops when you try to run the old images because suddenly every little write is (partially) duplicating data. The same will be true for other CoW copied that you do random writes to.

      It’s fine for almost all consumer tasks, of course, and it can save a lot of space at negligable performance cost.