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Questions tagged [filesystems]

A file system (or filesystem) is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it.

A file system (or filesystem) is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the specific characteristics of the device. A tight coupling usually exists between the operating system and the file system. Some file systems provide mechanisms to control access to the data and metadata. Ensuring reliability is a major responsibility of a file system. Some file systems allow multiple programs to update the same file at nearly the same time.

1994 questions
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how do I check if a bind mount on linux is private or shared?

The mount command allows us to make a bind mount shared, slave, shared+slave, private or unbindable, however, I was unable to figure for a given mount point what is type of subtree rooted at the bind-mount (shared, slave, private, shared+slave or…
anaken78
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Performance of Loopback Filesystems

Has anyone done any performance/benchmarking tests on Linux loopback file systems? What has your experience been so far. Is there any serious degradation in performance? How about…
psaccounts
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What is a Journaling file system?

What is a Journaling file system? Even wikipedia doesn't give much information. Apart from NTFS which other file systems(on Windows / Linux) support journaling and how does it give a performance boost?
Prasoon Saurav
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Why the path "//" is working?

Tested on a debian and debian-based: $ cd // && pwd && ls // bin build dev home ... Why is the path // a valid path?
bux
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What is the best filesystem for backing up on external hard drive?

I have a 1TB consumer grade NAS and I can use whatever file system I please on it. I only plan to ever use it with linux based systems, so windows compatibility is not really a priority. What is the best file system for archiving? JFS? Ext3? Ext4?…
Mike Axiak
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How can I find out what filesystem a particular directory is on

I have a system with symlinks EVERYWHERE, so given a particular directory, is there a simple way to find out what mountpoint this directory is on? Particularly interested in solaris.
Stu
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Best Linux filesystem for sparse files?

In some filesystems, blocks used when allocating new files are used to avoid reuse. When used for sparse files, such setup would lead to the file size constantly growing. Is there a filesystem that when allocating blocks for new files would try to…
d33tah
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When storing files, how many should I store per folder on a filesystem?

I'm building a service where I'll need to store a ton of files on a filesystem. I've heard in the past that it's better to separate up files by folder when dealing with large amounts of files. Is this really accurate for modern Linux filesystems…
Naftuli Kay
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df shows negative values for used

I am running Centos 7 and have an issue that the server ran out of space, was able to get in after a bad reboot and cleared temp files. Then cleared backups and server was back. Since then I spotted that the disk size from the monitoring was…
ExgenUK
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Best Long-term Large Filesystem

I store all my Music CDs, Music, DVD Rips, etc on hard drives for quick access and long term storage. What file system should I use? I use a bunch of drives glued together in an LVM so being able to grow and shrink would be nice, as well as…
Paul Tarjan
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Look through folder capability on Windows and Linux

I want to create a user playpen solution that is comprised of a look through pattern. Each user would have his own folder that he can see and write to. This folder will contain his/her personal files and it will look through to a read only folder…
John Leveille
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Recommended file systems

I've been setting a web server on Amazon EC2 over the past couple of weeks (Ubuntu 8.04). Because I want to my site to be load balanced over multiple web-servers at some point I've placed all my data on an EBS volume. In time I can attach this…
Luke
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What is the max number of devices (disks) that can be mounted?

And obviously I am meaning practically - is it dozens, or hundreds?
Michael Neale
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Filesystem block size confusion

I know that block size is, generally speaking, the minimal operation unit of a filesystem, but I was confused by fio, the I/O performance benchmark tool, which has a bs parameter to set the "block size". If block size is for a filesystem, why fio…
dotslashlu
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File system with read/write logging by user

Is there any file system - or monitoring tool - which logs which users have read and written which files? Something like this: 2014-01-21 13:45:45 john 12939 /users/john/hello.txt write 2014-01-21 13:45:55 paul 12939 /users/john/hello.txt …
forthrin
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