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Forgive my ignorance, but what benefits would an average user experience with this new file system?
by CoachRufus87 10y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but what benefits would an average user experience with this new file system?
- nisa 10y agoIn theory (the practical side is tricky to get right): - More resilience against data corruption for one due to copy on write and likely checksumming - so in theory power failure should not harm the filesystem and you can roll back to a last known state and only lose data for the last few seconds if at all. - Snapshots, before installing updates you can snapshot the filesystem and roll back instantly. You could also create a readonly snapshot to have consistent backups. This should also allow seamless rollback of OS updates. There are also clones supported e.g. multiple diverging versions of a file tree - think something similar to git branches on a filesystem level. - Native encryption at the filesystem level - Possible better handling of metadata. Faster access to directories with lot's of files, more files on a volume without slowdown. - Sparse files - you can create huge files instantly and fill them later, guess it's important for various types of software e.g. virtual machine images. But as nice as these properties are in theory history showed that that in practice a lot can go wrong.
- CoachRufus87 10y agoThank you for the explainer.