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File Systems#

We've talked about storage devices in the hardware section: HDDs, SSDs, etc. What we haven't covered is file systems, a very important part of systems administration.

Like most of these topics you can go really deep, but today we only need to know about the basics.

A file system can be thought of as a database for your files. When you create a file, the file system does the work of writing it to the storage device and then recording the details about the file: location, name, date and times, permissions, etc.

It stores all of this information so that you can "browse" your files, like this:

Some files

Some files (your files will be more important!)

Let's explore a few key topics:

  1. Filesystem types
  2. Partitions
  3. Filesystem mounts
  4. File system information
  5. LVM

With these basics we'll have a good idea of the basics.

Note

In "ITOps Level Two" you'll learn to create new disks in AWS, attach them to virtual machines, format them with a particular filesystem and then mount them inside of Linux for us. This is an intermediate topic.

Key Points#