21.1 Terminology

metadata

A file system–internal data structure that assures all the data on disk is properly organized and accessible. Essentially, it is data about the data. Almost every file system has its own structure of metadata, which is part of why the file systems show different performance characteristics. It is extremely important to maintain metadata intact, because otherwise all data on the file system could become inaccessible.

inode

Inodes contain various information about a file, including size, number of links, pointers to the disk blocks where the file contents are actually stored, and date and time of creation, modification, and access.

journal

In the context of a file system, a journal is an on-disk structure containing a kind of log in which the file system stores what it is about to change in the file system's metadata. Journaling greatly reduces the recovery time of a Linux system because it obsoletes the lengthy search process that checks the entire file system at system start-up. Instead, only the journal is replayed.