Understanding file formats and filesystems
A filesystem allows the operating system to find the data it stores on its local disk. These basic addressable storage units make a block (usually about 4,096 bytes in size). To find the contents of files, among the large number of available storage blocks, it uses inodes. An inode contains information about a file in a particular formatted storage block, such as its size, location, access rules (i.e., who can read, write, or execute the file), and much more.
Starting with Fedora Linux 33, the default filesystem format on Workstation Edition is Btrfs. Unlike other distributions that still use xfs or even ext4, Btrfs is a copy-on-write (COW) filesystem for Linux that implements many advanced features.
In a COW filesystem, once modified, a file is not written back to the same block on disk; it’s more like a redirect. This is for the preservation of the original data and to ensure writing the new data to unoccupied inodes. This allows...
