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Which filesystem should I use for stable storage? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by mimichuu_@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[-] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Id go with your distro default which I think is ext4 for most distros and do proper backups/data management (which might include a Nas running zfs--so you get the best of both worlds).

Depending on your data it might be small and not need a Nas necessarily. Things like code could go up on GitHub or gitlab. Games themselves can always be redownloaded etc. If your data is small enough, cloud storage isn't too pricey.

One of the best things you can do for a PC is getting a solid true sine wave battery backup that will let you weather electricity fluctuations, surges, brownouts ,and give you time to shut down properly during an outage.

[-] kogasa@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Distro defaults are chosen for general purpose use and stability. For op's specific requirement, zfs, xfs, and btrfs are all definitely better. For the boot drive, I can understand going for the default since you just want it to be stable, but having some snapshotting and fault protection isn't a bad thing.

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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