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.

  • Daniel QuinnEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’ve never heard of sub volumes. What do they do for me? Why not just partition the disk or store everything on the one partition?

    • mhz@lemm.ee
      5·
      1 year ago

      I like to think a subvolume is a directory on my filesystem that:

      • Acts as an independent filesystem.
      • Shares it’s parent size (unless quotas are set in place)
      • Can be mounted/unmounted any time
      • Excluded from their parent partition’s snapshots. (a /home subvolume is exluded from / snapshots).
      • Can be snapshot-ed independently.

      This is by no mead a definition for BTRFS subvolume, but I hope you get the idea.