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I have a 1TB consumer grade NAS and I can use whatever file system I please on it. I only plan to ever use it with linux based systems, so windows compatibility is not really a priority. What is the best file system for archiving? JFS? Ext3? Ext4? btrfs?

Mike Axiak
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ext4 with journaling turned on and delayed allocation (dealloc) turned off. The extents (introduced in ext4, but also available in xfs) will speed up dealing with large files--which I assume you'll be using.

immeëmosol
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Andrew M.
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  • Could you expand a bit on why you recommend those exact settings for journaling and delayed allocation? – kasperd Sep 21 '17 at 15:27
  • @kasperd This is a 6 year old answer, but... the only suggestions I gave were journalling on, delayed allocation off. Both prevent data loss, and there are a variety of articles about why these settings are valuable. – Andrew M. Sep 25 '17 at 19:00
  • This may be a 6 year old answer, but it was edited just a couple of hours before my comment. – kasperd Sep 25 '17 at 20:22
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Btrfs is quite stable nowadays [well, at least relatively :-) for 2.6.37 kernel] and it supports on-fly compression, amongst other nice features.

Ext4 is quite nice as well. Unless you're risky enough for Btrfs EXT4 could be good choice, but it's also not such matured comparing to EXT3.

JFS as a surprise, supports extents for a long time, formats/mounts fast and hence can be a good choice for back-ups (just remember that it has to be fsck'ed on unclean shutdown).

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poige
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I use btrfs. Why do I use something that isn't production quality? Because I've got several different backups, so corruption in one isn't a very big problem for me. And btrfs does checksums of data, so if I can recover from the backup, I can be sure that the data is intact.

ptman
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    Btrfs is still unstable. Mike wants a filesystem for backup, which means archival, perhaps for a long time (who knows when that data will be necessary?). I wouldn't recommend a filesystem that is not considered stable yet. – Juliano Jan 31 '11 at 04:44
  • @Juliano: And you think I failed to bring this up in my answer? – ptman Jan 31 '11 at 06:08
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    I think he meant what happens if 5 years later you go back to the data only to find the specification was finalised after you wrote it and you cant read it back any more ? – Sirex Jan 31 '11 at 07:56