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.

  • AMDIsOurLord
    251·
    1 year ago

    Using Btrfs you can do some pretty cool snapshotting: It’s basically like system restore of Windows but MUCH faster and pretty seamless. Even if you annihilate the whole operating system you can restore the snapshot and voila, have fun! It also has compression which can save some wear on SSDs and of course give you some more free™ storage space, which is cool [actual benefits depend on workload*]

      • AMDIsOurLord
        4·
        1 year ago

        ZFS has almost everything ever conceived for filesystems lol it’s a whole ass volume manager and filesystem into one

    • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      I wasn’t cool enough to figure out how to “just boot into a snapshot” when I tried btrfs a while ago. I mean I did figure it out (maybe?) but somehow the read/write rights where messed up and the snapshot couldn’t actually boot/I wasn’t able to log in +___+ Just reinstalled the system eith good old ext4. It sounds really cool, though …

      • AMDIsOurLord
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, sounds like a setup or distro issue. It should work without problems on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Linux Mint even really supports it as a setup-less default with TimeShift

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      Do you know how I could split my default /var/home/user into /var/home/user/.var, /var/home/user/Torrents and the rest?

      Think that would be great for use with btrbk, when I find out how to use that.

      Damn BTRFS and btrbk need an easy GUI, I have the feeling its great for backups

      • AMDIsOurLord
        2·
        1 year ago

        There’s no GUI, but following the wiki pages on BTRFS subvolumes you should be able to make a subvolume for those with like 2 simple commands (take a look at the man page for BTRFS subvolumes as well)