NTFS, fat32, exfat, could I theoretically create my own filesystem? If so would my computer even be able to work with most files or connect to other devices?
NTFS, fat32, exfat, could I theoretically create my own filesystem? If so would my computer even be able to work with most files or connect to other devices?
Lots of good answers, especially using FUSE for experimentation. One thing I’ll add is that if you just didn’t want to use any filesystem at all … you don’t have to!
At least in the Unix realm, a disk drive is just a bunch of contiguous blocks, and you can put whatever you want in them. Of course, Unix itself famously needs a filesystem for itself, but if you want to just store all your giant binary blobs – cryptocurrency block chain? – directly onto a drive without the pesky overhead or conveniences of a filesystem, that’s doable.
It’s not generally a useful idea to treat a disk drive as though it’s a tape drive, but it does work. And going further into that analogy, you can use “tar” to collect multiple files and fit them onto the drive, since a tarball preserves file metadata and the borders between files, but not much else. This is the original use of tar – “tape archive” – for storing Unix files onto tape, because the thought of using tape as working storage with a filesystem was – and still is – a terrible idea. And that’s basically the original impetus for a filesystem: it’s better than linear access media.