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.

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) project allows you install new filesystems without touching your Linux kernel. The filesystems run as regular programs, allowing them to use shared libraries and perform tasks that would be difficult from inside the Linux kernel. FUSE filesystems look just like regular filesystems to other applications on the machine.

Bonnie++ allows you to benchmark how your filesystems perform various tasks, which makes it a valuable tool when you are making changes to how your RAID is set up, how your filesystems are created, or how your network filesystems perform.

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.

The ext4 file system is to be the successor to the ext3 journaled file system and will be available as an optional file system in the next release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04.

The rm command can be a powerful tool for deleting data -- until you delete the wrong files or directories. Thankfully, the ext3undel utility can recover accidently removed data on ext3 filesystems.

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?

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?

The Linux filesystem is one big tree rooted at /, and yet we have filesystems on different devices and partitions. How do we resolve this apparent incongruity?