File Systems: An Important Topic for Digital Storage and Preservation

Before I started looking into what file systems were, or why they might be important for digital preservation, I had an idea of what they might be: the way that files are organized on your computer. There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that, and those of us interested in the organization of digital information, should know about the basics.

Different computer operating systems have different file systems for organizing information, both for presentation to the user through the GUI, and also for organizing on the hard disk for ease of access by the computers. The different aspects of how the file system is designed will show up in the way that ‘files ‘ are arrange in ‘folders’ within ‘directories’ on your computer. Is there a flat or a hierarchical structure? How long can file names be?

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system):
“More formally, a file system is a special-purpose database for the storage, hierarchical organization, manipulation, navigation, access, and retrieval of data.”

Common file systems are NTFS, the standard for Windows NT, including Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. It replaced a file system called FAT, improving on FAT in a number of ways, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS), including the support of metadata, improved and speedier performance for getting to files, and more security, including the use of "journaling," which means that the file system documents itself, so that in a crash less information will be lost.
Macs use a file system now called HFS+.

I actually (surprisingly) found a really interesting and funny article on the history of file systems from Ars Technica. “From BFS to ZFS: past, present and future of file systems” http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/past-present-future-file-systems.arsin by Jeremy Reimer from March 2008.