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
    14•8 months ago

    ext4 certainly has its place, it’s a fine default file system, there’s really no problems with it.

    But others, like ZFS and BTRFS, have features that you may want to use, but ext4 doesn’t do: fs snapshots, data compression, built in encryption (to a degree, usually only happening for data and some of the metadata, so LUKS is often better IMHO), checking for bitrot and restoring it when possible (whether it is depends on your config), quotas per user group or project, spanning multiple disks like with RAID but safer (to a degree), and others.