How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4

LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."

Comments

Wikipedia entry

[drgould]

Link to Ext4 entry on Wikipedia for people who aren't familar with it (like me).

To all ext3 users...

[c0l0]

...who are on the lookout for a new fs to entrust with keeping their precious data: make sure to check out btrfs ( http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ ). It's a really neatly spec'd filesystem (with all the zfsish stuff like data checksumming and so on), developed by Oracle employees under GPLv2, which will feature a converter application for ext3's on-disk-format - so you can migrate from ext3 to the much more feature-packed and modern btrfs without having to mkfs anew.

On a related sidenode: I'm very happy with SGI's xfs right now. ext\d isn't the only player in the field, so please, go out and boldly evaluate available alternatives. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

Re:Not for the casual user

[Vellmont]

It is unlikely the common desktop (or even, for that matter, the common server) will see appreciable performance increase with it.

Disk sizes are going up. In a few years you'll see a terabyte on a single drive. I'd also say that features like undelete, and online de-frag are important to anyone.

So while you may not see any real performance increases, that's really beside the point.