I'd posted this in rely to a thread on the general forum, but as it's a phone issue I thought it should be discussed in some detail here
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Interestingly, it seems that from Gingerbread Android is moving towards ext4
"The reason this should be of concern to Android developers is that with 2.3, an increasing proportion of devices, notably including the Nexus S, are going to be moving from YAFFS to the ext4 filesystem…"
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It will also change the way that the handset interacts with the flash chip. YAFFS2 does it's own wear leveling, presumably for ext4 it'll be dealt with at hardware level. Which for us (despite the difficulties that YAFFS posed) seems the tougher position if you're looking for previous blocks at the rawest level.
Hi AlexC, is this to say that all android devices will be using the EXT4 file system and if no, how do you check the file system via an extraction or browsing through the phone?
Some Android devices also use F2FS file system.
wilx, u can use ADB and mount command while in the shell - u'll get mount points and FS types.