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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.

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Which filesystem should I use for stable storage? (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello everyone. I'm going to build a new PC soon and I'm trying to maximize its reliability all I can. I'm using Debian Bookworm. I have a 1TB M2 SSD to boot on and a 4TB SATA SSD for storage. My goal is for the computer to last at least 10 years. It's for personal use and work, playing games, making games, programming, drawing, 3d modelling etc.

I've been reading on filesystems and it seems like the best ones to preserve data if anything is lost or corrupted or went through a power outage are BTRFS and ZFS. However I've also read they have stability issues, unlike Ext4. It seems like a tradeoff then?

I've read that most of BTRFS's stability issues come from trying to do RAID5/6 on it, which I'll never do. Is everything else good enough? ZFS's stability issues seem to mostly come from it having out-of-tree kernel modules, but how much of a problem is this in real-life use?

So far I've been thinking of using BTRFS for the boot drive and ZFS for the storage drive. But maybe it's better to use BTRFS for both? I'll of course keep backups but I would still like to ensure I'll have to deal with stuff breaking as little as possible.

Thank you in advance for the advice.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I use ext4 for my boot drive as that’s what Linux mint defaults to.

I do not do raids and use btrfs on my other drives.

You can turn on compression on write with btrfs which may reduce the amount of data being read and written to your drive which could further reduce its lifespan.

But you shouldn’t expect the drives to last 10 years.

They might, but don’t expect it and have a backup of whatever is important. Ideally you should have a local backup and a cloud based backup or at least an offsite backup somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I'll always do backups. When I have the money I probably will buy another drive and try to do RAID1 on the two, just to be sure. But I do want them to last as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Don’t use raid for backing up use a backup program instead. I’d recommend vorta or kopia.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It wouldn't be for backing up, just for the storage to last longer if one drive fails.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I would still not recommend it. If the drive fails and data is lost or corrupted it could also be lost or corrupted on the other drive.

It would really be better to use backup software to save your data. Also depending on how the drive is used, it may put less wear on the second drive if you use a backup application.