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
And LVM is more than good enough for occasional snapshots before a major upgrade.
What’s lvm like compared to btrfs?
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This article or section is out of date.(Discuss in Talk:Btrfs) Warning: Since Btrfs is under heavy development, especially the btrfs check command, it is highly recommended to create a backup and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.
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.
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.
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
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 prefer using ext4 for stability. But if stability doesn’t matter to you, you should use BTRFS.
I’ve been very happy with btrfs. Ext4 is basically rock solid, so you can’t really go wrong with it, but btrfs has some nice features that ext4 doesn’t have, like snapshots. And it’s fast. I have an extremely cheap SSD that’s too slow to run anything with ext4, but actually usable with btrfs.
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Btrfs is cool because it supports snapshots, if you don’t plan on using these, just go with ext4
Not just snapshots. Also compression and CoW.
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
I don’t know what’s the brand neW meta pick, but at least BTRFS over Ext4. BTRFS is just more stable and less corruptable than Ext4. Heck, fedora changed to it as default
To be fair, Fedora switching to something as default isn’t a good sign that you should start using it. I do agree, though, btrfs has come far enough to be a default choice for most people.
What did fedora adopt that wasn’t a good choice in hindsight?
PulseAudio?
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.
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 have 3 drives in my pc. I have btrfs for root so I can do my snapshots, and the rest are on ext4. I’ve heard very good things about xfs, too, but I’m more familiar with btrfs and ext4
XFS. It fills the same role as ext4 but it’s less likely to lose your data and that’s probably the most important part of a file system. Not that ext4 is bad or anything, but XFS is good. The only downside to XFS is you can’t shrink the filesystem size.
agreed. EXT4 for system, XFS for everything else (mostly large VM image files). when XFS is properly configured for the underlying drive array geometry, its a nearly perfect streamlined FS.
BTRFS &/OR EXT4
Btrfs or XFS.
No idea why people are into EXT4. XFS is more performant by far.
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