Just a simple question : Which file system do you recommend for Linux? Ext4…?
EDIT : Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I will try btrfs on my root partition and keep ext4 for my home directory 😃
If you’re just doing a vanilla Linux install, ext4 is the way to go.
Upvoted. Not everyone wants to rely on backups and restore broken system every month like on BTRFS
We’re not in 2014 anymore.
File system is a core component of any electronic system. Even if it’s just 1% less stable than other ones, it’s still less stable. Maybe it’s faster in some cases and supports better backups but ehh idk if it’s worth it. Losing documents is something you probably want to avoid at all costs
Yeah, but it isn’t noticeably “less stable” if at all anymore* unless you mean stable as in “essentially in maintenance mode”, and clearly good enough for SLES to make it the default. Stop spreading outdated FUD and make backups regularly if you care about your documents (ext4 won’t save you from disk failure either which is probably the more likely scenario).
* not talking about the RAID 5/6 modes, but those are explicitly marked unstable
My short BTRFS history
- Installed on a 1TB NVME
- used for 2 years
- Rebased my system a ton, used rpm-ostree a ton (which uses BTRFS for the snapshots I think?)
- Physically broke the SSD by bending (lol used a silicon cooler pad but it bent it) which resulted in hardware crashes
- With
ddbarely managed to get all the data onto a 1TB SATA SSD dd-ed the SATA SSD onto a 2TB NVME- deleted and restored the MBR, resized the BTRFS partition to max, resized the BTRFS filesystem to max, balanced it
Still works, never had a single failure
Well gtk if it’s really as stable as ext4. I will still stick to ext4 though because why change what already works well and tested on almost any machine you can possibly imagine?
I suppose by being more efficient, “using modern technology” (everything saving Google, Meta, Amazon etc. money and is thus extremely well funded, all server related stuff), is good for the environment.
If something runs faster on the same hardware, it may use less energy. It may also just be restricted in hardware usage, like not using multithreading.
Linux Distros shipping x86_64-v2 packages is a whole other problem…
I have an x86_64-v2 CPU so I highly disagree with your statements.
I disagree. My partition is ext4, but Timeshift saved my ass when an upgrade went wrong. I just had to restore the system from a previous snapshot taken before the upgrade.
Of course updates can break stuff. What I don’t understand is why would you intentionally go for a less stable FS that can break and corrupt all files? It’s especially bad on old machines with limited space where full backups are not possible
Are you talking about ext4 or BTRFS?
Updates can break stuff on any file system but BTRFS is known for worse stability, at least in the past
I’m running it for over 3 years as complete linux moron with no issues whatsoever. It was default in openSUSE and its automatic snapshot feature saved my ass multiple times. I’ve heard everyone saying ext4 is super stable and I should use it, but I went with default and can’t complain.
I never tested BTRFS on SSDs under 128GB or even HDDs, but never had a corrupted one.
Those anecdotes are worth little so it would be best to have current data.
One of the above points was that the claims are outdated, which would be really interesting to verify.
Like, making a study with many different parameters
- hdd, sata ssd, nvme ssd, emmc, etc.
- size: 50-200MB, 1GB, 16GB, 128GB, 500GB, 4TB (from small embedded, to IOT, to usb flash drive, to smartphone, to laptop, to Server/Backup)
- amount of usage: percentage filled, read/write per minute
- BTRFS actions: snapshots, balance, defragment
If full backups aren’t possible that’s an administrator failure.
Reliance on a file system to never fail rather than have proper backups, is an administrator failure.
ANY system can, and will, fail. Thinking and behaving otherwise is an administrator failure.
“Everything gets gone, sooner or later” - being prepared for it is good administrator behaviour.
Yes but why intentionally choose a worse option? Sorry but it’s not very smart imo.
And not having enough space is not an administrator failure. It’s usually budget issue. And are you saying that making apps bloated (like severely bloated) is ok and the user should always be blamed for having lower hardware?
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And LVM is more than good enough for occasional snapshots before a major upgrade.
What’s lvm like compared to btrfs?
Well lvm makes a shit filesystem and btrfs is useless at volume management.
LVM creates “block devices” and is FS agnostic. You can install btrfs on an LVM volume if you wanted. Or any other FS for that matter.
But since it doesn’t know anything about the FS it can be a bit more cumbersome to modify volumes (especially when shrinking).
Good that you mentioned that. Reminded me that I have an Arch Linux install here where I forgot that I did choose BTRFS during installation. Within maybe a month I noticed FS errors. Looked scary. Nervously searching for documentation was even more scary :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#btrfs_check ->
This article or section is out of date.(Discuss in Talk:Btrfs) Warning: Since Btrfs is under heavy development, especially the btrfs check command, it is highly recommended to create a backup and consult btrfs-check(8) before executing btrfs check with the --repair switch.What is this? My beloved Arch Wiki is not 100% perfect!
Then found this :
WARNING: Using ‘–repair’ can further damage a filesystem instead of helping if it can’t fix your particular issue.
Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a developer or an experienced user, and then only after having accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types of filesystem corruption. E.g. some other software or hardware bugs can fatally damage a volume.
I figure this explains the popularity of BTRFS snapshot configurations. Luckily I had some backups :)
Filesystem snapshots won’t help, if the filesystem itself corrupts. But I’ve been using BTRFS for 6 years now and haven’t had a file system corruption, so mileage may obviously vary.
In my opinion, it depends. If a distro has BTRFS configured to automatically take a snapshot when upgrading (like OpenSuse Tumbleweed), then BTRFS.
If not, for a beginner, ext4 + timeshift to take snapshots of your system in case an upgrade goes wrong will be fine.
But you can also just use BTRFS without any fancy setup and not use its features, it will still be faster.
Btrfs has many advantages over ext4, but being faster isn’t one of them.
Btrfs is slower than ext4, xfs, and f2fs in pretty much every metric. Noticeably slower app opening times is the reason I switched to F2FS for good.
Edit: BTRFS has advantages that likely make it better for me.
It has compression and allows flexible partition sizes. The compression may explain the speed decreases.
Compression might be useful in some cases, but the bulk of my data is already compressed or not much compressible (think videos, images, compressed archives, game assets). So the trade off doesn’t make much sense to me.
That is true, not for Flatpaks but for sure.
I wonder how much of a pain it would be not having BTRFS subvolumes on atomic Fedora. Will try F2FS in a VM.
Very interesting. I heard F2FS has no journalling, but afaik Fedora Atomic doesnt rely on it?
It might be worth looking into, as it beat many tests.
Mint doesn’t default to btrfs, but will use it if you so choose during install. And it integrates fantastically with Timeshift. I’ve set up daily and weekly snapshots and have peace of mind.
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I don’t have that sort of time. A snapshot let’s me get back running in no time.
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Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.
ext4 has been battle-tested for many years and is very stable. Doesn’t have the same fragmentation and data loss issues certain other filesystems like NTFS have.
And it has repair tools that actually work and can make the filesystem usable again.
Until you pull the power at the wrong time. Its better to use Btrfs as others have said.
But pulling the power on a btrfs drive at the wrong time results in you not even being able to mount it as read only. No snapshotting can help you there.
I have not had that experience
ext4 unless you need features offered by another FS.
Especially just getting into linux. Ext4 works well enough, when you learn enough to care about what it doesn’t do well try something then
Btrfs. Just format as one big partition (besides that little EFI partition of course) and don’t worry about splitting up your disk into root and home. Put home on its own subvolume so that root can be rolled back separately from it. You can have automatic snapshots, low-overhead compression, deduplication, incremental backups. Any filesystem can fsck its own metadata, but btrfs is one of the few that also cares if your data is also intact.
It cares so much that when it goes wrong you can’t even mount the partitions as readonly to try get your data back. It will stubbornly hold on to it and refuse any access at all. Boy I am so glad it didn’t let me access a potentially corrupted byte somewhere!
As 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
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t actually have an opinion, just go with the default, ext4 really is a very good file system, but if you want to have an opinion and not go with the default, zfs is truly a fantastic file system.
I personally use ext4 everywhere but it is recommend to have BTRFS for your OS partition if you take snapshots often.
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
Sure, but btrfs has some built-in tools for this and makes it pretty easy
Not just snapshots. Also compression and CoW.
I would recommend using btrfs on SSDs and ext4 on hard drives.
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 on hard drives? Btrfs would be better for both.
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.
How about bcachefs. I’m waiting for it to support swapfiles, which seems to be in the TODO list, but so far doesn’t work. If you use swap partition[s], or prefer not to have swap at all (I never fell for this, and besides swap is required for hibernation if that’s a thing for you), then bcachefs is ready for you. It’s already part of linux since 6.7, and on Artix, current linux is 6.8.9…
To me is the FS to use. I’m still on luks + ext4 (no LVM) and do entire home backups with plain rsync to an external device. I’d have to learn new stuff, since ext4 is really basic and easy to configure if in need, but I think bcachefs is worth it, and as mentioned, just waiting for it to support swapfiles, :)
Thank you for sharing this. I didn’t know this FS yet. It seems new and have some nice goals. I always have a grudge against zfs/btrfs because of the resource usage/performance.
I’ll keep an eye on this. I’d love to find some benchmarks.
Not yet, but bcachefs will be the future as the goals replicate most of OpenZFS while not having that licencing issue.
Just go with whatever is the default of your distribution.
That said I’ve come to love the automatic snapshots OpenSUSE gives me with BTRFS. I think they use snapper to automate that. It does a snapshot before and after every packet install, update or removal. And it has some system to delete snapshots that aren’t needed anymore but it always keeps enough to give you peace of mind, especially when you’re experimenting.
I should look into keeping some snapshots of my ~ as well. And I should implement that especially for my family.
Snapper is life saver. I don’t get it why nobody else use it by default, it’s so great. It saved me many times. My coworker, who happens to be kind of non-linux user forced there by MS bullshit, uses Ubuntu and she’s got to problems so many times, and all those would be couple clicks repair with Snapper…
