File System

File systems are standards for organizing, maintaining, and accessing data on a disk drive. This will not be a crosswalk of file systems.

You may need to take a step back and look at creating a partition table first.


Mounting File Systems


fstab

On a Linux system, /etc/fstab informs on what volumes should be mounted and with what options. This configuration file is structured as:

# <device>                                <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <fsck>
UUID=f9fe0b69-a280-415d-a03a-a32752370dee none  swap   defaults  0      0

Spacing between columns is arbitrary.

The <device> column should identify the device either by device file (i.e. /dev/sdXN) or by UUID (preferred). You can get the UUID of a device with blkid.

The <dir> column is the mount point.

The <type> column indicates file system type. You can get the file system type of a device with blkid.

The <options> column can contain any of:

The <dump> column is used by the dump utility--if you don't need that utility (and most people don't), set it to 0.

The <fsck> column is used by the fsck utility, and enables boot-time filesystem checks.


Creating File systems

Henceforward you will see reference to sdXN, where you should understand that X needs to be replaced with the relevant letter and N with the relevant number. You should also understand how to find that relevant letter and number combination, and the risks of finding the incorrect letter or number.


ext2

Don't.


ext3

Seriously. Don't.


ext4

If you are creating ext4 file systems, you probably are using Linux. Therefore, let's assume you have the Linux toolset available.

Running 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 of getting that is steep though. Expect much slower performance, greater instability, and incompatibility with standard Linux file metadata.

On Linux, run as superuser:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdXN


MS-DOS

On Linux you can run as superuser:

mkdosfs /dev/sdXN

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


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