Earlier this week I’ve read this article: “Defragmentation of Linux Filesystems“. The title and the headline made me interested enough, to go ahead and read it and see if there was something there to show me that linux filesystems do need defragmentation.

when I started using Linux four years later, I was told that with Linux I didn't need to defragment my filesystems anymore, since Linux filesystems don't get fragmented in first place. At that time it left me puzzled, but after a few years of using Linux without defragmenting my filesystems - and without any problems! - it seemed defragmentation was something antique. Nonetheless I still wondered how on earth it was possible the 100k+ files in Gentoo's portage system - updated every time I synchronize the portage tree - didn't fragment my filesystem. Or was my filesystem fragmented and did I not know?

There is a myth that “linux filesystems don’t need to be defragmented.” As it may be truth in general, it still can be dispelled by a simple script, which creates a certain number of directories and in each of them creates and deletes a certain number of files - in, let’s say, two passes. So, does your filesystem need defragmentation?

By now, everyone knows that if you want to make a file unrecoverable, you can't simply delete it - you have to use a tool like 'shred' or 'srm' to overwrite its contents. But a common question is whether this is effective on an ext3, ext4, or other journaled filesystems. This article discusses these filesystems, and whether secure deletion tools work on them.

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a specially-designed database of files, their disk location, definition and attributes.

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS and NFS. But, is there a perfect filesystem?

If you currently have Windows OS running and you need some files for your work which you have stored on the Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux! Explore2fs Explore2fs is a GUI explorer tool for accessing ext2 and ext3 filesystems. It runs under all versions of Windows and can read almost any ext2 and ext3 filesystem.

This article covers standard and journaling (also called journaling) filesystems with an emphasis is on ext2 (standard filesystem) and ext3 (journaling filesystem), but tools for other filesystems are mentioned too. Most of this material applies to both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Most examples in this article use Fedora 12, with a 2.6.32 kernel. Your results on other systems may differ.

Linux, being the chameleon that it is, has the ability to support many different file systems, either natively or with “outside” help. Besides its native ext2 (and more recently ext3) file system, it can also handle DOS’ FAT16 and FAT32, Windows’ NTFS4 and NTFS5, OS/2’s HPFS, and Macintosh’s HFS, just to name a few.