

This guide helps you understand file systems in many contexts. When people talk about file systems, they might refer to different aspects of a file system depending on the context - that's where things start to seem knotty.Īnd you might end up asking yourself, WHAT IS A FILE SYSTEM ANYWAY? 🤯

If the requested resource is a file, it's fetched from a file system. Whenever you download a file or access a web page over the Internet, a file system is involved too.įor instance, if you access a page on freeCodeCamp, your browser sends an HTTP request to freeCodeCamp's server to fetch the page. Or when you copy, edit, or delete a file, the file system handles it under the hood. :) What is a file system?Ī file system defines how files are named, stored, and retrieved from a storage device.Įvery time you open a file on your computer or smart device, your operating system uses its file system internally to load it from the storage device. But I'll sneak into the lower-level concepts as well, as long as it doesn't get boring. This post is meant to be a high-level overview of file systems. That's why I decided to write an article about it.

It's a bit tricky to explain what exactly a file system is in just one sentence.
