Filesystem

A filesystem controls how data is named, stored, accessed, and retrieved on a device such as a hard drive, USB, DVD, or another medium. Each filesystem for a specific OS will specify its conventions for naming files, such as the length of the filename, the specific characters that can be used, how long the suffix or file extension can be, and more. There are some file descriptors or metadata about a file that most filesystems contain, such as file size, location, access permissions, date created, date modified, and more:

Figure 12.1: Filesystem metadata for a file

Files are generally placed in some sort of hierarchal structure. This structure typically consists of multiple directories and sub-directories. The placement of the files within the directories is a way to organize your data and get access to the file or directory:

Figure 12.2: Filesystem directory structure

As shown in Figure 12.2, the top-level directory is...