[Discuss] Moving Your Everyday System to New Hardware

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

> From: jbk <jbk at kjkelra.com>
>
> I haven't found a compelling reason to use another fs other than
> ext4.

I'm conservative, so I've been using extN filesystems since, I think, I
was running Slackware.  Since then, I've taken to putting extN on top of
LVM.  And of course ext3 and ext4 have journaling, which has eliminated
broken file systems due to system crashes.

But I've changed to favor XFS, specifically because it supports
copy-on-write copies.  If I'm worried about messing up a medium-sized
directory structure full of stuff, "cp -a --reflink=always ..." makes a
backup astonishingly quickly.  Beyond that new capability, I haven't
noticed any significant changes from extN.

I'm told ZFS is popular and supports copy-on-write, but it adds another
layer of volume management, so I chose XFS as the path with lowest
learning curve.

Dale