Ext4 being "old" shouldn't put you off. It is demonstratively robust with a clear history of structure integrity. It has immense popularity and a good set of recovery tools and documentation. These are exactly what you are looking for in a filesystem.

I'm not saying EXT4 is the best for your requirements, just that age of a file system is like fine wine.

ext4 being old, and still being the main file system most distros use by default, should be enough alone to tell you being old isnt bad.

it means its battle tested, robust, stable, and safe. Otherwise it wouldnt be old and still be in widespread use.

ext4 is good enough.

It really depends on your priorities. Single drive is good for a home system with nothing really important on it.. once you get to wanting to keep it and where recovery from backups is too much downtime, you want at least a drive mirror.. nothing wrong with exr4+mdraid for that, although you don't get the checksumming that zfs gives it will be pretty fast & if a drive fails you can run degraded on one drive until you get the new drive in.

I've been running zfs for 10 years and not lost a single byte of data even after doing stupid shit like tripping over the sata cables and disconnecting half the drives. It's survived multiple drive failures (as long as the failures are on different bits of the disk, it recover get a clean copy onto a third drive, but it's a brown trousers moment when stuff like that happens).

Downsides, it aint fast, and it does tend to like lots of memory. You want it on your fileserver, not your gaming system.

IMO there's no point in a single drive zfs.. it'll warn you faster that the drive is f*cked but what do you do then?

ext4 works perfectly fine for me and most people.

If you're married stay away from ReiserFS.

Be conservative and use the simplest thing that supports your needs and don't be suckered by feature lists. I have never needed more than ext4. It generally has the best all round performance and maturity is never a bad thing when it comes to filesystems. It isn't most suitable for some embedded and enterprise environments and if you are working with those you generally know the various tradeoffs.

Been using BTRFS for all disks and purposes for a few years, I would recommend it with the requirement that you research it first. There are things you should know, like how/when to disable CoW, how to manage snapshots, how to measure filesystem use, and what the risks/purposes of the various btrfs operations are. If you know enough to avoid doing something bad with it, it's very unlikely to break on you.

ITT 5 answers by 4 people

FAT32

I still swear by F2FS, been super reliable and very good perf

btrfs is great for system stability because of snapshots. You can set it up to automatically make snapshots at a timed interval or every time you run pacman.

If something breaks, you can just revert to a previous snapshot. You can even do this from grub. It's a bit hard to set up, so if you want, you could use an arch based distro which automatically sets it up like GarudaOS.

XFS is a possibility

If you are planning to have any kind of database with regular random writes, stay away from btrfs. It's roughly 4-5x slower than zfs and will slowly fragment itself to death.

I'm migrating a server from btrfs to zfs right now for this very reason. I have multiple large MySQL and SQLite tables on it and they have accumulated >100k file fragments each and have become abysmally slow. There are lots of benchmarks out there that show that zfs does not have this issue and even when both filesystems are clean, database performance is significantly higher on zfs.

If you don't want a COW filesystem, then XFS on LVM raid for databases or ext4 on LVM for everything else is probably fine.