Using ext2 -- quite annoying at power-losses. Somewhat affraid of turning it into ext3. Using ReiserFS3 on a mountable partition -- never had problems with it.

You could convert to ext3 and if you don't like ext3 you can turn it back to ext2 all without formating

I use ext3 for my linux partitions and fat32 for partitions that share between Linux and Windows. I've read some stuff about others such as, reiser, xfs and jfs. It seems to me that the filesystem one chooses should depend on what the computer will be used for. For general use ext3 is probably best. If you have massive amounts of files to search through reiser might be better. If you work with a lot of large files you might prefer xfs.

My principal concern with a file system is reliability and the ability to restore data properly. I remember reading the O'Reilly book on backups years ago. The author, a master of backups, pointed to the 'dump' utility as being the most reliable way to backup and restore data. Dump is available only for ext2 and ext3 systems. I use ext3. I've used Reiser for one Slackware machine, but got somewhat disturbed when a power outage left the machine in an unbootable state. My backups were tar based, and ultimately did not suffice. Ultimately the box was rebuilt using an ext3 partition. Though there have been subsequent power outages, I (so far) have not had any problems.

Sure would like to see native zfs on linux.. was an interesting article in one of the Linux mags about it's capabilities recently..

http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE

Guess that's not the question this thread asked though...

apolinsky, you may need to have a deeper look into xfs. No dump functionality?

Jay73:

Thank you very much. I'll have to look more closely at xfs. There is no question that the journalling file systems have progressed over the years. As you might guess Reiser left me a bit cold. Xfs might have the necessary functionality of a file system.

This is the end of my testing with ReiserFS V3 included in the ubuntu kernel 2.6.

After a system crash, my linux partition needed a fsck --rebuild-tree, but that was not enough, my partition is now corrupted and file system is not bootable.

Not so bad, for two months and several system crashes, only one was definitely corrupted. Reiserfs could be a good choice, waiting V4 to be included in the kernel as the first atomic fs.

I have switched from Ext2 to Reiser fs about 7 years ago and have been using it ever since. I have never any problems with it. This contrasts with my experience with XFS. I have had unrecoverable corruption many times on XFS partitions, so much so, that I do not use it any more.

I typically use the Linux boxes as Samba servers with several hundreds of thousands of files on a partition.