How do I avoid Bit Rot?
Does it matter which file system I am using if my OS is a Linux Distro?
If I have a drive with files on it that were copied there while using a windoze OS and I add files to that drive using Linux are the new files safe?
For the Linux OS root file system I highly recommend the Ext4 file system (some like Xfs).
For data storage, if the drive was used by windows relatively recently it is probably either NTFS or FAT32. Linux can read/write to both of those without the drive losing data and the NTFS and FAT32 filesystems will probably be readable for quite a few years to come on most systems. If you are using Linux full time or even primarily then I would suggest copying all the files to a linux filesystem then reformatting the drive to one of the ‘standard’ Linux journaling filesystems, my favorite is Ext4.
The link below covers, in a fairly short discussion, Ext4 as well as Ext, Ext2, Ext3 and alternate filesystems like Btrfs, Xfs and Zfs along with a few pros and cons about them:
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That was enlightening. Thanks for that. 
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