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You can convert your existing Ext3 filesystem to Ext4 with an easy procedure.Things to remember
* Unmount the filesystem before convert
* Filesystem must be non-root
This way you can improve the performance, storage limits and features of your existing filesystem without reformatting and/or reinstalling your OS and softwares.
I did mention that the new filesystem - ext4 is stable, fast and backward compatible with ext2 and ext3. Today, we will look at how you can upgrade your existing ext3 filesystem to ext4 without reformating your hard disk.
The ext3 filesystem supports write barriers which are designed to allow a filesystem to take advantage of a disk’s write cache without fear of compromising the ingetrity of the filesystem on a power failure or kernel panic.
The filesystem used in the vast majority of Linux (and to a lesser extent on other Unix) distributions is the ext3 filesystem, which stands for extended filesystem. Slashdot recently pointed to an article on IBM DeveloperWorks discussing the new ext4 filesystem currently in development, and some of its new features. So what is a filesystem really?
If you currently have Windows OS running and you need some files for your work which you have stored on the Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux! Explore2fs Explore2fs is a GUI explorer tool for accessing ext2 and ext3 filesystems. It runs under all versions of Windows and can read almost any ext2 and ext3 filesystem.
One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used.
This article is meant to serve as a guide for migrating a live system from ext3 to an ext4 filesystem, including migration of files to use extents, a major feature in ext4.
Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS and NFS. But, is there a perfect filesystem?