These refer to many things in views to hard drives and file storage techniques. Here are the different usages of term, and examples of each which you come across in daily execution.

The Facts

1. General use of term "file system," occasionally written as one word, is formatting technique utilized to initialize a hard drive. On Windows PCs, file systems are generally FAT or FAT32, or NTFS; on Macintosh PCs, file systems are always HFS+. There are many other types of file systems like ZFS, which are not generally utilized on home PCs.

Significance

2. File systems give both technical technique of reading from and writing to hard drives, with metaphor utilized by programmers and users in conceptualizing their data. The standard metaphor, of PC files stored in hierarchical folders, is so general that most people forget it's a metaphor at all. But as all PC data is just a sequence of bits, there are other methods of conceptualizing this data. The discontinued Apple Newton e.g. stored information in a "data soup" format which bypassed files totally.

Benefits

3. File systems give different low-level benefits; many are not visible to end user, but which are intended to given increased safety and speed. E.g. Apple switched from HFS to HFS+ to permit for a bigger maximum hard drive size and to allow "journaling," which is a technique of maintaining data integrity even when drive errors happen.

Filing Types

4. Electronic filing systems can also refer to theoretical techniques utilized to arrange files and folders. General technique is hierarchical; a writer stores her letters in a sequence of nested folders like Documents, Correspondence, Family, 2009, February. Faster hard drive search machines makes hierarchical filing needless in several cases, so various people have switched to alphabetical filing, in which all is just stored in a Correspondence folder, which would show after "Archive" and before "Education." An option is Noguchi filing system, where all is stored by date it was written.

Considerations

5. In many cases, you won't want to choose on which hard drive file system to
utilize; there will be a default depending on operating system, which only want to modify if you expect hard drive to be utilized on many operating systems. Though, you want to think using various conceptual filing systems, as many people spend much time working with hierarchical systems, which could be saved if they depend on their PCs to search their files as required.