Crash course on file systems

File system in computing means how a storage devices stores and reads data. To put that in perspective, Library would represent a storage device (say a hard drive) in that case, book shelfs will represent file system and individual books will represent data. So its easier to find data in if u know where to find it. Now lets see some most common file systems and where they are used

FAT 8 bit (file allocation table)
one of the oldest file systems designed for floppy disks and was adopted for use in hard drives and other storage devices. but has many limitations and not used today.

FAT12/FAT16/FAT 32 (improved versions of file allocation system)
It had many advantages over original one. each one is progressively improved on previous one, FAT32 being the latest one. it is widely used in flash drives but cannot accept file sizes more than 32MB for FAT 12, 2GB for FAT16 and 4GB for FAT32. This file system is soon going to be outdated as file sizes are increasing because of high resolution videos.

exFAT
It is fairly new file system and is supported in versions older than windows vista. It is not backward compatible with FAT12/FAT16/FAT 32. Also supported in Macs (10.6.5+). supported in Linux but needs few packages to be installed first. It doesn't have 4GB file size limit as opposed to fat32.

NTFS (new technology file system)
most commonly used file system in hard drives.supports encryption, file compression, resizing, indexing and many more features. that makes it most widely used system.

HFS+ 
it is used macs. Macs can read / write in FAT 32 by default. but only read with NTFS (can be written with third party applications). Linux can read / write HFS+ drives but not more than 2TB. windows (XP onwards) can only read from HFS+ but not write.

Ext2/Ext3/Ext4most commonly used in Linux. its fairly old and lacks supports for many features. but ext4 is better than previous systems. windows and macs don't work on these though. However Linux can  read both NTFS and FAT32. [Btrfs (better file system) is in development and may replace ext4 in linux]