It depends, but as a rule of thumb for more traditional servers and development workstations ZFS is a superior choice. You can probably look at https://mwl.io/n

It depends, but as a rule of thumb for more traditional servers and development workstations ZFS is a superior choice. You can probably look at https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os#fmzfs https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os#fmzfs to get a quick and straight forward introduction. For me, ZFS beats other approaches with snapshots/ rollbacks and send/ receive. It really hits you, when you develop something using a database or a lot of files. If you want to test something, just do a snapshot (even without shutting down the database) and just try it out. If you mess up, you can at the very least shut the DB down, rollback (which is instant) and start the DB again. It will be in the state before you messed up. You can also make a clone and spin up another instance and compare. With files, you can even diff snapshots, so as to extract e.g. a deleted file. Also this is a great mitigation against ransomware, if your network drives are backed by ZFS. Also in the case of a database, compression and the integrity guarantees help a lot. You can do some tuning because of it that might make your performance better/ more consistent - because backups can get a lot more efficient and you can cache more data in RAM when it is compressed or buy better SSDs when they don't need to be that large. Now you can probably do something similar with btrfs, e.g. Turris Omnia is using btrfs internally and it saved me once while I was doing some broader reconfiguration. Otherwise, I don't know about it - it is probably reliable enough. You can do LVM snapshots. There are many approaches to solve a particular problem. ZFS was just designed to do some of these things and has about 15 years of production use in some of the most serious settings. XFS or EXT4 is a decent choice for systems that you just don't want to think about. They are available by default, don't usually need any kind of tuning/ configuration. XFS is probably the better choice instead of EXT4, if you have a typical mdadm/ lvm RAID for e.g. surveillance camera recordings. For VMs that do some computation but the data is stored elsewhere, you can use the usually default EXT4 for the base filesystem. Converting such systems to ZFS might not be worth it. For the company database, filer, archive, backup ZFS should be something you evaluate as the first option. Just be sure you know a bit about how ZFS stores its data and how to configure the values for your use case. ZFS is more rigid in some places however extremely flexible in others be sure to understand where the rigid parts might be a problem to you.