What's the best linux journalling filesystem?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2005-02-05 01:38pm

Well, the thread title says it all. What do you think?

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2005-02-05 02:48pm

Each one has their pros and cons. It all depends on what you're using it for.

Reiser4 seems to be good in design. I haven't used it yet so I don't really know.

ReiserFS 3 is a decent filesystem. Pros are that it seems to be nice and stable. The cons are that if it's not umounted correctly (due to a power bump or what have you) it takes forever to fsck.

XFS I have honestly never had any sort of problems with. I know that its journaling mechanism is supposed to be very RAM-intensive and thus volatile in the case of a power failure, but my machines have XFS for the root partitions and I've never had trouble with them. After a power failure, fsck goes almost instantly and the machine is back up and running.

ext3 is ext2 with a journal. I stopped using it a while ago and haven't seen very much reason to go back. fsck takes a long time, I've had some bad errors after power failures that prevented the computer from booting, etc.

I've never tried IBM's jfs.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-02-05 11:47pm

I've generally favored XFS.

Terr Fangbite · Post by **Terr Fangbite** » 2005-02-06 07:32am

I generally just use ext2. Never really used any of the others. Never had any problems with it.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2005-02-06 12:27pm

ext3 is what I use and I don't like it. Takes forever to fsck and from what I've heard can have problems. Plus there's the fact that It's just a kludge to get journalling on ext2. I would be using something different but I formatted stupidly and the way my partitioning is set up it wouldn't be fun to reinstall. I figure at somepoint I'll burn my important data to cd (and make a list of programs to tell apt -get to download), nuke this hdd and then when I reformat I'll use something better. Probably just as well. This box is getting kinda convoluted (and it has shit I never use. I have like 5 webbrowsers).

Jew · Post by **Jew** » 2005-02-07 01:18pm

darthdavid wrote:ext3 is what I use and I don't like it. Takes forever to fsck and from what I've heard can have problems. Plus there's the fact that It's just a kludge to get journalling on ext2.

Weird. I use ext3 and love it. I especially like that it can be mounted as ext2, which means lots of old tools work with it.

Anyway, that's beside the point. If you don't want ext3, I suggest ReiserFS. (Not to be confused with Reiser4. Reiser4 is too new to be trusted with critical data.) Many Linux distributions use ReiserFS as their default filesystem, and if it's good enough for them it's worth a try. I've not used it much, but it has worked for me the times I did try it.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2005-02-07 08:10pm

Semi-appropriate n00bish question -

If I've got ~300Gb of stuff on various partitions that I mistakenly accepted as ext2, is there a simple way of shuffling things around to change filesystems? I usually use reiserFS (not for any particular reason) and I just mis-clicked to get ext2.

Jew · Post by **Jew** » 2005-02-08 09:06am

I have converted ext2 filesystems to ext3. That's easy--you can convert back and forth pretty much at will. This web page has some instructions.

But you want to convert ext2 to ReiserFS. That's a whole different sort of problem. I've never done it, and my advice to you is to back your data up to another hard disk or partition, and reformat the partition you want to convert.

But if you *must* convert, it might be technically possible. Check out this HOWTO for Gentoo Linux. Those instructions indicate that you can convert an ext2 filesystem to ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, and others. You might be able to adapt those instructions to whatever system you're running. However, you'll still want to make sure you have recent backups; they say that data corruption is possible.

My advice is that you don't try to convert any filesystems from ext2 to ReiserFS. Just reformat them and restore your data from backups.