File Systems

File systems are protocols for the organization of data. Compared to commercial operating systems, Linux is compatible with a large number of file systems.

See here for creating a partition table.

Setup

Devices are referenced as sdXN, where X is the relevant interface letter and N is the relevant partition number.

ext2 and ext3

Don't.

ext4

Run as superuser:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdXN

Consider disabling access time on secondary and storage drives. Setting this metadata isn't always helpful and carries a speed cost.

# <device>                                <dir> <type> <options>        <dump> <fsck>
/dev/sdXN                                 /var  ext4   defaults,noatime 0      0

FAT32

The main advantage to FAT32 is it near-universal mount-ability. (Expect issues on a vanilla macOS environment!) The cost is performance, instability, and incompatibility with standard Linux file metadata.

Run as superuser:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdXN
# or
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdXN

MS-DOS

Run as superuser:

mkdosfs /dev/sdXN

But you should also know that mkdosfs is a symlink to mkfs.vfat.

Usage

A file system is used by mounting it as a disk.

mount

To manually mount a volume, try:

mount /dev/sdXN /mnt/DIR

You may need to specify the file system type, using the --types FSTYPE option.

If you run into persistent errors, try fsck /dev/sdXN to check for file system errors.

udisksctl

udisksctl wraps the udisks utility to aids in mounting devices.

Run udisksctl status to see an overview of all devices. A volume can be mounted or unmounted using udiscksctl mount -b /dev/sdXN and udiscksctl unmount -b /dev/sdXN,

fstab

See the fstab(5) file.

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