Beyond picking a filesystem, you should be familiar with various filesystem tools. Filesystem creation options and performance enhancing tools can improve disk throughput, and partition resizers enable you to grow or shrink a partition to better suit your storage needs. Filesystems sometimes become corrupted, and fixing these problems is critical when they occur. Finally, one very common problem is that of accidentally or prematurely deleted files. Knowing how to recover such files can save you or your users a lot of time and effort.
When you installed Linux, the installation program gave you options relating to the filesystems you could use. Most distributions that ship with 2.4.x and later kernels support ext2fs, ext3fs, and ReiserFS. Some also support JFS and XFS. Even if your distribution doesn't support JFS or XFS, though, you can add that support by downloading the appropriate kernel patches or prepatched kernels from the JFS or XFS sites and compiling this support as a module or into the kernel proper. You can then convert a partition from one filesystem to another by backing up, creating the new filesystem, and restoring. (Support for JFS has been added to the 2.4.20 and 2.5.6 kernels, and XFS has been added to the 2.5.36 kernel. Thus, these filesystems are likely to become options for most distributions at install time.)
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