Linux

If you're not intending to use complicated RAID setups, just go with btrfs. There is no reason to bother with zfs given your specs and needs.

Do not go with ext4. Unlike both btrfs and zfs, ext4 does not do data checksumming, meaning it cannot detect bit rot (and obviously cannot fix it either). You'll also be missing out on other modern features, like compression and copy-on-write and all the benefits that entails. Once you start using snapshots for incremental backups using btrfs send (or its zfs equivalent), you'll never want to go back. Recommended script: snap-sync.

Ext4 with backups

A lot of these responses seem.. dated. There's a reason TruNAS and such use ZFS now.

I would recommend ZFS 100%. The copy-on-write (allowing you to recover almost anything), simple snapshots, direct disk encryption, and ability to not only check the file system, but tell you exactly which file has an issue if there is an error, make it an easy choice even if its a one-disk system.

Personally I use date times for my snapshot names, and delete old ones as time goes on. Its fabulous for backups.

btrfs and you get snapshots, the ability to send subvolumes around + compression and a ton of other stuff.

be aware that to configure a good layout in btrfs you will need to do that manually, follow the arch wiki and you will be ok.

I recommend using whatever is the "least hands-on" option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don't mess with it, I think you'll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I've personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you're looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you're doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.

Zfs with zraid/mirror and increased copies

It's self healing and can't corrupt on power loss

Been using BTRFS for several years and have never once had any sort of issue. i just choose BTRFS at system setup and never think about it again. I like that when I copy a file it is INSTANT and makes my computer feel super fast, whereas EXT4 can take several minutes to copy large files. This is with similar use to what you describe. No RAID.

I use ext4 for my boot drive as that’s what Linux mint defaults to.

I do not do raids and use btrfs on my other drives.

You can turn on compression on write with btrfs which may reduce the amount of data being read and written to your drive which could further reduce its lifespan.

But you shouldn’t expect the drives to last 10 years.

They might, but don’t expect it and have a backup of whatever is important. Ideally you should have a local backup and a cloud based backup or at least an offsite backup somewhere else.

ext4 is the tried and true file system. I use that for reliability. Btrfs is nice with a ton of modern features, but I have had some issues in the past, but they are pretty rare.

It's gonna be a hard decision to make. I know that because I read about Btrfs for about a whole week before deciding to switch to it. But, I'm a happy Btrfs user now for about 8 months, and I'll be honest with you, in my opinion, if your application does not mainly involve small random writes that'll make Btrfs inevitably fragment a ton, it is most likely good for any situation. I don't know much about the other modern/advanced filesystems like ZFS or XFS to tell you anything about them though

I've been using ext4/btrfs for a long time,but recently I decided to give xfs a try and it feels pretty solid all rounder fs.

I know it's a very old and very well supported fs,developed by Silicon Graphics and has been getting constant improvements over time with various performance improvements andchecksuming. TBH,for my use casesanything would work but BTRFS snapshots were killing my storage and I got bored with the maintenance task.

Archwiki has amazing documentation for all FS,so might be worth a look.

This might be controversial here. But if reliability is your biggest concern, you really can't go wrong with:

• A proper hardware RAID controller

You want something with patrol read, supercapacitor- or battery-backed cache/NVRAM, and a fast enough chipset/memory to keep up with the underlying drives.

• LVM with snapshots

• Ext4 or XFS

• A basic UPS that you can monitor with NUT to safely shut down your system during an outage.

I would probably stick with ext4 for boot and XFS for data. They are both super reliable, and both are usually close to tied for general-purpose performance on modern kernels.

That's what we do in enterprise land. Keep it simple. Use discrete hardware/software components that do one thing and do it well.

I had decade-old servers with similar setups that were installed with Ubuntu 8.04 and upgraded all the way through 18.04 with minimal issues (the GRUB2 migration being one of the bigger pains). Granted, they went through plenty of hard drives. But some even got increased capacity along the way (you just replace them one at a time and let the RAID resilver in-between).

Edit to add: The only gotcha you really have to worry about is properly aligning the filesystem to the underlying RAID geometry (if the RAID controller doesn't expose it to the OS for you). But that's more important with striping.