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What are your experiences with filesystems?

In the last couple of years, after an intermezzo with Windows, I returned to Linux and macOS. Artix became my favourite distribution, since it combines the vast amount of software from Arch with the simplicity of runit. My first experiences with Linux date back to 1999, when I tried Linux Mandrake. Since then I did hundreds of Linux installations and a repeating question are the filesystems and their behavior in case of a hard reset. Back then, about 20 years ago, It tried ReiserFS, XFS, JFS and the ext-family. Except from the ext-family, all of them led to unmountable partitions after a power reset. Now, almost 20 years after that, there are a couple of new filesystems and some of the old ones matured a lot (in particular XFS). So what are my experiences with filsystems nowadays?

My setup is a an SSD in a USB-case that I use with various machines, but all of them support EFI.

* NILFS2: Interesting concept, but tends to become unmountable after crashes and it lacks repair tools, so data loss is likely.
* F2FS: Similar to NILFS2, more stable, actively developed, but I experienced a crash I could not repair.
* ReiserFS: Works, but old and slow with a complicated on disk format. Not much development anymore.
* JFS: Needs repair after almost every single reboot, not much development after 2012.
* NTFS3 (Paragon): I tried it for /home but on one of the machines I had trouble with a missing nvidia driver so I had to switch off the machine without a proper shutdown. After that the superblock of NTFS was damaged and I had to repair it with Win10. I got a lot of lost+found files :D
* XFS v5: No problems at all. In the last couple of years it never crashed. If there was something wrong, I didn't even notice. The developers did a great job in improving XFS.

There are two filesystems I can't say much about as I didn't use them for years:

* Btrfs
* ext4

What are your experiences?
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ARTIX Dinit + SDDM + Enlightenment

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #1 –
I installed Artix XFCE OpenRC on six PCs with ext4 as the file system.
Never had any problems and yet there were power cuts and wild reboots.  8)

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #2 –
BTRFS has been reliable for me and even with a USB stick that became faulty I could run scrub and it told me which files were affected and had been corrupted.
Portability is the main downside I can think of - Windows has no method to use even old and common types like ext2, 3 and 4, also BTRFS. You might find some 3rd party read only support for ext, but the only reliable way to do something simple like move stuff to and from a USB in Windows is install a Linux distro in a virtual machine. So the new ntfs3 looks like it might be useful for some of those situations, as other Windows types lose UNIX permissions which is annoying to use with Linux.

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #3 –
I have used ext4  exclusively for a long time...never had a file system issue that I know of so I have had no reason to experiment with anything else. It just works.  :)

Best regards.
We should try to be kind to everyone.....we are all fighting some sort of battle.

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #4 –
I have used ReiserFS, XFS (back to the old Slack & Gentoo days) and ext4. Depends on your drivers and files in the system, ReiserFS is efficient on small files. XFS is efficient on large driver and large files. However, both don't have good journal support. Have been on ext4 for many years. Like many other users, have never experienced any serious issues on ext4. I guess it's the best FS for average Linux users.

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #5 –
Ext4 has been my go-to filesystem since I started using Linux a few years ago. Extremely reliable, survived many difficult situations unscathed. I've had pretty much the same experience as @tintin.

Once this HDD fails, I'm considering giving Btrfs a go, though - snapshots seem to be a useful feature for tinkerers like me, and back when my previous machine's disk failed, something like its scrub command could be helpful for data recovery. Unfortunately, many important files are in these ext4 partitions, so that'll have to wait.

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: capezotte – on
Unfortunately, many important files are in these ext4 partitions, so that'll have to wait.
Have you tried to recover some files with testdisk and photorec ?

I have done this from a "live USB" session, but you have to write the recovered data to another hard drive (not the problematic drive).

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pacman -Ss photorec
extra/testdisk 7.1-3
    Checks and undeletes partitions + PhotoRec, signature based recovery tool

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: xanadu – on

There are two filesystems I can't say much about as I didn't use them for years:

* Btrfs
* ext4

What are your experiences?

Welcome @xanadu

Well, I've been distro hopping for a few months. I tried the two file systems BTRFS and EXT4.
My 2 cents:
- BTRFS seems really promising, snapshot feature, faster than EXT4 (noticed in boot time on HDD). My main issue with it as I am using KDE Plasma and baloo for search there is a a bug already filed with baloo that it reindex the snap shots all the time (so I get multiples results for the same file, index file keeps growing, machine sometime gets unresponsive as it is always indexing new snapshots. If baloo fixes this bug I will go for BTRFS for sure because no matter what happens to your system you can boot from grub to a previous working snapshot. so no need to reinstall no matter what.
- EXT4 working fine and great. No complaints.
System:  Kernel: 6.4.10-artix1-1 , KDE Plasma 5.27.7, HP Spectre x360 Convertible 13-ae0xx
Dual Core  i7-8550U bits: 64
8 GB Ram - SSD:  (250 GiB), BTRFS

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: calvinh – on
I have used ReiserFS, XFS (back to the old Slack & Gentoo days) and ext4. Depends on your drivers and files in the system, ReiserFS is efficient on small files. XFS is efficient on large driver and large files. However, both don't have good journal support. Have been on ext4 for many years. Like many other users, have never experienced any serious issues on ext4. I guess it's the best FS for average Linux users.

I'm not sure, if the journal support of XFS didn't get a lot better. In the last decade XFS got a new on-disk format (XFS v5, stable since Linux Kernel 3.15), which is incompatible to XFS v4. It got a free inode btree and a reverse mapping btree. Besides that it was turned into a copy-on-write filesystem with deduplication (reflink), they added checksums for metadata, 64 bit timestamps (thus XFS is now year 2038 proof) and many other things. Since XFS is constantly changing, it should be reevaluated every now and then.
Code: [Select]
ARTIX Dinit + SDDM + Enlightenment

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #9 –

I haven't had a single incident with ext4 except on USB sticks (an interface I will be dumping for good as soon as I can anyway).
Before ext4 I had used ext2 but my real favorite was Reiserfs, unfortunately it went AWOL although I'd heard that certain gov. agencies are not only using it but also developing for their own use.  Btrsf was, when I first enquired, dd-unfriendly so I didn't even look at it (dd is my backup tool and if it ever goes I cease all computing activities).
 
Who, has loved us more?
 

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: xanadu – on
There are two filesystems I can't say much about as I didn't use them for years:

* Btrfs
* ext4
These are exactly the two filesystems I use. I started using Linux about 20 years ago with IIRC ext2, then ext3 became a trend, and then I moved to ext4 when it became a standard. This is a well-proved, efficient and reliable FS, you can never go wrong with it. Just install and forget.

Now I use ext4 for my data partitions on a large HDD. I install my system on a btrfs partition on an SSD (NVMe  to be precise). Btrfs is overall a bit less efficient than ext4 (but there are some tasks which btrfs perform better than ext4) due to the features it provides (mostly copy-on-write, COW). But I think that btrfs is hands down the best FS for SSDs and system partitions on flash drives. It provides handy automated compression (I use zstd:2), which lowers the wearing of your SSD: this can be very helpful with rolling-release distros like those Arch-based, because you usually get a lot of updates regularly. Also, btrfs supports snapshots (which can be automated in conjunction with pacman and grub), and this is a very handy backup tool, especially for rolling-release distros, where something can unpredictably go wrong during an update.

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #11 –
"(dd is my backup tool and if it ever goes I cease all computing activities)"
dd isn't a very good backup tool unless you verify the results afterwards somehow because it doesn't check what it's written, unlike cp -a or rsync. If you had a real bad sector it could dd over it (if the write's didn't error out) and not care, because it doesn't use a filesystem at all but writes directly to the disk. (Although I suppose if you wanted to clone the entire disk and did check it, it would work OK  :D )

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #12 –
Ext3 then ext4  but now i use btrfs on new instals

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: mandog – on
Ext3 then ext4  but now i use btrfs on new instals
Hi mandog
Just curious if you are on KDE Plasma and using baloo.
If so what about BTRFS snapshoting home folder and reindexing over and over again? (giving multiple entries when searching for a file and index keeps growing).
This is the main issue keeping me away from BTRFS.
Is there a way to "exclude" home folder from being included in snapshots?
I hope there is!

Thank you.
System:  Kernel: 6.4.10-artix1-1 , KDE Plasma 5.27.7, HP Spectre x360 Convertible 13-ae0xx
Dual Core  i7-8550U bits: 64
8 GB Ram - SSD:  (250 GiB), BTRFS

Re: What are your experiences with filesystems?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: limotux – on
Is there a way to "exclude" home folder from being included in snapshots?
I hope there is!
As VictorBrand explained: you use btrfs for the / partition and ext4 for the / home partition.

So you can take a snapshot of / and a backup with rsync or grsync of your / home.