Just a simple question : Which file system do you recommend for Linux? Ext4…?
FS is for nubz, do these instead:
Read
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/stdoutWrite
dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sdaAs someone who ran BTRFS for years, I’m personally switching back to EXT4. Yes, the compression and other features are nice, but when things go wrong and you have to do a recovery, it’s not worth the complexity
Care to explain?
When booting into a live CD, mounting the various subpartitions is super annoying.
When your disk space hits full, things break uncontrollably because different programs don’t have a consistent measurement of how much space is left.
When shrinking partitions, you can lose data if you shrink it too much. I’m not talking about forced overrides of any configs, I’m talking about things like KDE Partition Manager.
All of these things can be excused one way or another, but at the end of the day I just want a stable filesystem that doesn’t lose my docs.
Ah yes, the free space calculation stuff is still a mess.
Overall, I’ve been daily-driving btrfs on some system and it’s been treating me well. But yeah, they still got a long way to go.
I’ve found it much easier and way more reliable. If I pull out the power on ext4 it is likely to cause corruption and sometimes you can’t fix it.
Btrfs is pretty much impossible to completely corrupt. I’ve had drives fail and I didn’t lose anything
Lemme say this - While complex, I can vouch for recovering files on BTRFS. I can’t vouch for recovering files on ext4, because I never had to.
I’ve always used XFS on spinning drives and F2FS on SSDs. No issues, they’re very solid
Btrfs is cool because it supports snapshots, if you don’t plan on using these, just go with ext4
I don’t use snapshots but i love the compression.
Umm correct if um wrong but cant you make a snapshot of ant file system
I’m going to go against the flow here and say BTRFS. It’s stable enough to the point of being a non consideration. You get full backups using a negligible amount of storage. Even using it on Windows is easier than using ext4 with the winbtrfs driver.
Do what OpenSUSE Tumbleweed suggests, make a brtfs partition for your system and xfs/ext4 for home parition
Btrfs. It was the default filesystem already when I used Fedora on both my personal and work laptops. Not a single problem. It is true I don’t really make much use of most of its advanced features like snapshotting, CoW, etc., but I also didn’t notice any difference whatsoever in stability compared to ext4 so I’m pretty happy with it as my new default.
I would recommend using btrfs on SSDs and ext4 on hard drives.
Ext4 on hard drives? Btrfs would be better for both.
Ok but please explain subvolumes, the information has failed to latch onto my brain
Subvolumes are somewhat like a partition, but they don’t have fixed size. What they allow you to do is take snapshots. Snapshots are used to backup and restore the subvolume. They can be created instantly and don’t take up any space until something is changed.
If I’m trying to install Linux with BTRFS, and it doesn’t work, what are some of the most likely mistakes I’ve made?
What distro? Some installers will set everything up for you and others you have to setup subvolumes manually.
EXT4 for Linux. exFAT for removable drives. Never regretted.
I am not interested in fancy technologies. EXT2/3/4 has been here for a few decades.
Ext4 for most home users, because it’s simple and intuitive. Btrfs for anyone who has important data or wants to geek out about file systems. It’s got some really cool features, but to actually use most of them you’ll have to do some learning.
I always go LVM + BTRFS these days. I simply love the versatility.
I’m curious, why do you use LVM with BTRFS and not just use BTRFS built in subvolumes?
Because I’m stupid and like to run my partitions across multiple drives. 😅
btrfs every day of the week. The only scenario where I’d even consider something else is for databases that would suffer from CoW.
I’ve been running it on my home server since 2010. The same array has grown from 6x2TB to 6x4TB, one disk at a time as they’ve failed. Currently sitting at 2x18TB+1x4TB. No data loss even though many drives have failed.
Btrfs or XFS.
No idea why people are into EXT4. XFS is more performant by far.
XFS is good but dated
I agree that’s why most of my systems run btrfs. (Maybe soon bcachefs).
But XFS is in the same tier of “datedness” as EXT4, just with more performance. Some apps like ScyllaDB actually require XFS performance crazily enough.
ext4 for system partitions and zfs for anything dedicated to personal data storage.
I love zfs. Started using it for my data storage pool and now I have it on root as well. It has some rough edges but overall it is very stable and has amazing features.
