Understanding filesystem types in Linux

When talking about physical media, such as hard drives or external drives, we are not referring to the directory structure. Here, we are talking about the structures that are created on the physical drive when formatting and/or partitioning it. These structures, depending on their type, are known as filesystems, and they determine how the files are managed when stored on the drive.

There are several types of filesystems, some being native to the Linux ecosystem, while others are not, such as specific Windows or macOS filesystems. In this section, we will describe only the Linux-native filesystems.

The most widely used filesystems in Linux are the extended filesystems, known as Ext, Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4, the XFS filesystem, ZFS, and btrfs (short for B-tree filesystem). Each of these have their strengths and weaknesses, but they are all able to do the job they were designed for. The extended filesystems are the ones that were most widely...