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Questions tagged [filesystems]

A file system (or filesystem) is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it.

A file system (or filesystem) is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the specific characteristics of the device. A tight coupling usually exists between the operating system and the file system. Some file systems provide mechanisms to control access to the data and metadata. Ensuring reliability is a major responsibility of a file system. Some file systems allow multiple programs to update the same file at nearly the same time.

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How does ZFS Block Level Deduplication fit with Variable Block Size?

According to The First Google Result for "ZFS Deduplication" ... What to dedup: Files, blocks, or bytes? ... Block-level dedup has somewhat higher overhead than file-level dedup when whole files are duplicated, but unlike file-level dedup, it…
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Workaround for mounting a filesystem to a local directory without elevated privileges on Linux

I've got an ext3 filesystem sitting in a file, and I'd like to mount it to a local directory without sudo or any elevated permissions. Why? I'm creating a small filesystem for automated testing purposes. The automated tests run on machines I do not…
Chris Betti
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Huge File System?

Suppose that one has 100 machines (each with a 2TB hard drive), all connected in a network. Is there a way (in Linux) to unite this combined 200TB of disk space into one folder, that can be shared using NFS among all machines that are in the…
user76976
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Can a tmpfs become fragmented?

Since a tmpfs exists only in memory, can it become fragmented like memory can? Are there mechanisms to automatically defragment the memory, and thus increase - even slightly - the access speed of stored files?
Laurent Pireyn
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Clarify something about Linux directory permissions

I'm almost ashamed to admit that there is one thing I am still unsure about when it comes to file permissions. Let's say I have a directory with 750 permission (drwxr.x...). Then I create some descendant files inside it with a rather common 644…
thomasrutter
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What's a good tool for collecting statistics on filesystem usage?

We have a number of filesystems for our computational cluster, with a lot of users that store a lot of really large files. We'd like to monitor the filesystem and help optimize their usage of it, as well as plan for expansion. In order to this, we…
Kamil Kisiel
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How to have ZFS make snapshots of a directory only when files are changed?

Is it possible to have ZFS make snapshots of a filesystem i.e. pool/filesystem/ only when files are changed? Instead of using cron or something to automatically create a snapshot every 5 minutes is it possible to have ZFS automatically take…
caleban
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How to check the creator of a file in Windows?

I want to find out who created a certain file but all I can see under Security tab is Administrators group being pointed out as owner. This is not very helpful. How can I see who really created the file? BTW. Came across those 2…
thoughtcriminal
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How do you know who or what is locking a removable disk?

I was reading that question How do you know who or what is locking a remote file? and I remember that question... even in Windows7, the Windows doesn't show that program is locking the removable disk, so we cannot safely remove the hardware. There…
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Suggestions for recommended file system for Linux server

There are many file systems for a Linux server administrator to choose from. Also, it is not always an easy task to figure out the appropriate layout and optimal file system for your needs. Can you suggest some guidelines for choosing the "optimal"…
Khaled
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file ownership for new files with administrator - why is it giving ownership to the group administrators?

I am logged in as administrator and I right click on a folder and then go to properties, then the security tab, then advanced, then the owner tab. I am not on a domain. I see that the folder has a group ownership of administrators. I change this…
Brian R. Bondy
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Free space on ZFS file system unexpectedly missing

Going to completely rephrase this question since it's still an outstanding production issue several months later. I have a FreeNAS 0.7.2 box, based on FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE-p1, running ZFS with 4x1TB SATA drives in RAIDz1. I appear to have lost 1TB of…
tomfanning
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What is the purpose of a volume label on a Linux file system?

I don't understand the purpose of a volume label on a linux file system. Can someone help me to understand?
Thomas
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Truecrypt or LUKS?

My work requires my laptop hard drive (running Linux) to be encrypted and from what I can tell TrueCrypt and LUKS seem to be the two major contenders out there. In a "normal" system, if the system crashes (power gets cut, etc), it's easy to recover…
user36696
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NFS - Files on client are not appearing on server

Heres my set up: One NFS Server machine, two NFS client machines. The client machines write files to the NFS mount, but occasionally, the files don't appear on the NFS Server machine or other client machines..... I'm absolutely stumped on this…
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