231
What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?
(lm.paradisus.day)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
231 points (96.4% liked)
Linux
48259 readers
423 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Not sure about the other ones, but I use Btrfs because of subvolumes and backups.
Subvolumes are like special folders inside of your partition that mount separately. Ex. In my btrfs partition, I have a @home partition that is mounted to /home
This makes it easier to choose what you are backing up, because you can say, "just copy everything in @home to the backup location"
If I got any of that wrong, feel free to correct me!
I mean, is it actually easier to copy everything in @home than it is to copy everything in /home? Btrfs has always kinda felt like it's a bunch of extra steps to solve problems I don't have.
Kinda. You can copy your snapshots from @home too, meaning a restore from backup also restores your local file version history. There are also tools to push snapshots around as a large archive instead of dealing with smaller files directly.
The COW can also reduce the chances of running rsync on a large file that is currently being accessed, and getting a partial file in your backup. Or I suck at rsync 🤷♂️
You're right, atomic snapshots are a big advantage of CoW fs.
Rsync backups done while the system is running have a chance of being broken, while CoW fs snapshots are instant and seem basically as if the system suddenly lost power.