File Systems.

What does File System mean?

• A file system is a mechanism that controls how and where data will be stored, accessed, and handled on a storage disk, usually a hard disk drive (HDD). 
• It is a logical disk portion that manages internal operations of a disk as it pertains to a machine and is abstract to a human user.
• Different-2 operating systems support various file systems. To better reliability, your removable drive should be using FAT32, unless it's bigger and requires NTFS. 
• Mac-formatted drives use HFS+ and have no Windows feature. And Linux has file systems of its own too.

File Systems 101

• Various file systems are simply different ways to organize and store files on a hard drive, flash drive or any other storage device.
• Storage device has one or more partitions, and each partition has a file-system "formatted." 
• The formatting process creates just that sort of empty file system on the computer.
• A file system provides a way to break the drive data into single pieces, which are the files. 
• It also provides a way to store data about these files — their filenames, permissions and other attributes etc.
• The file system also contains an index (a list of the files on the drive and where they are stored on the disk) so that the operating system can see what's on the drive in one location instead of combing to find a file through the whole drive.
• Your operating system needs to understand a network of files so that it can view its contents, open files and save files. 
• If your operating system does not understand a file system, you may be able to install a file system driver that supports it or you may simply not be able to use that file system with the operating system.
• There are different ways of organizing these files and storing data about them — “file systems.”

An Overview of Common File Systems

• Here is a quick overview of some of the most popular file systems you can come across. It's not exhaustive — there are a lot of others.

File Systems

FAT32:-

• FAT32 is an older framework for Windows files, but it is still used on removable media. Larger external 1 TB hard drives are likely to come in NTFS format.
• You will only want to use this for small storage devices or to be compatible with other devices such as digital cameras, game consoles, set-top boxes and other devices that only support FAT32 file system.

NTFS:- 

• Current Windows versions beginning with Windows XP — use the NTFS file system to partition their code. 
• It is possible to format external drives with either FAT32 or NTFS.

HFS+:- 

• Macs use HFS+ for their internal partitions, and they also like to format external drives with HFS+, this is needed to use an external drive with Time Machine to properly back up file system attributes, for instance.k up file system attributes, for instance.
• Macs also used to read and write to FAT32 file systems, but also they can only read from NTFS file systems by default.

Ext2/Ext3/Ext4:- 

• On Ubuntu, you will often see the file systems Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4. Ext2 is an older file system which lacks important features such as journaling.
• If the power is gone or a device crashes when writing to an ext2 disk, data may be lost. Ext3 provides these features of robustness at the expense of some speed.
• Ext4 is simpler and more modern, it's now the default file system on most Linux distributions, and it's faster. 
• Such file systems are not supported by Windows and Mac-you will need a third party tool to access files on such file systems. 
• For this purpose, formatting your Linux system partitions as ext4 is often desirable, and leaving removable devices formatted with FAT32 or NTFS when compatibility with other operating systems is necessary.

Btrfs:-

• Btrfs — "better file system" — is a newer, still in development, Linux file system. 
• It's not the default at this point on most Linux distributions, but will probably one day replace Ext4. 
• The goal is to provide additional features that allow Linux to scale up to larger storage amounts.

Swap:- 

• In Ubuntu, the file system called "swap" is not really a file system. 
• The operating system can only use a directory formatted as "swap" as swap space it's like the page file in Windows, but includes a separate partition.