I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

  • NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
  • Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
  • Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
  • xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
  • FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
  • exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
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    1 month ago

    Depends. Slower desktop machines XFS.
    Standard desktop XFS, if it has a smaller SSD, Btrfs.
    Home server ext4/XFS + ZFS. Generic servers at work ext4/XFS, backup/storage servers ZFS.
    Database server, experiment with ZFS with compression enabled - ratio 2:1, but encountered problems (probably a bad HBA model), standard ext4/XFS.
    Hosts with virtualization, small server - XFS, big server - ZFS (technically a ZVOL).