Why I use ext4

Re: Why I (still) use ext4 for my Linux root filesystems

I use ext4 for all of my Linux filesystems.  It’s safety in numbers: Files are fraught with peril notes that it is tricky to support different journal modes on ext4, let alone different filesystems.  btrfs may reorder directory operations, which other filesystems don’t.

So, it seems to be safer to make the expected choice.  For me, using Ubuntu, that’s ext4 in ordered mode.

Does it lock me into the decisions of the past?  I don’t know.  The filesystem developers could have “done it wrong,” but ext4 implemented extent-based allocation tracking, reaching feature parity with other common filesystems of the time.  That was probably the whole reason to raise the version number.

The performance story is pretty much a wash.  Whether one filesystem beats another or not, the numbers are typically pretty close.  In what is hopefully closer to real-world usage, I failed to find a difference in VM boot time using ext4 vs xfs on the file system.  If I’m not going to be running filesystem benchmarks as my primary workload, and the benchmark performance doesn’t translate to a real-world effect, then why bother?

I also don’t take snapshots for backups; I’m interested in surviving a complete disk failure. I’ve lost two disks that way, although one had the decency to limp along just long enough to get the important parts of /home copied from it.  Backups are now “I copy important data to a USB disk.”  One of those disks is only rarely connected, for ransomware resistance.