[Discuss] File systems that support file cloning

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 08:54:11 -0500
"Derek Atkins" <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:

> I am pretty sure that ext2/3/4 supports shrinking.

It does, kind of. While resize2fs can shrink an ext2/3/4 file system, it
won't necessarily work on every file system depending on allocations,
and it won't redo inodes to match the new size, and it won't resize the
underlying partition. JFS on AIX is the only file system that I can
recall doing it all end to end.

> Certainly (V)FAT supports shrinking (although I am certainly not
> recommending that).

I can't speak to *FAT but while NTFS does support resizing it is similar
to ext2/3/4 in that it can be inconsistent.

ZFS (aside from zvols) makes that whole category of problems go away:
you never need to resize a data set.

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