As I mentioned in the title, I’m not looking to save space, I want to test something. In Windows, you could use this option on a folder and still access the contents and run executables while keeping the folder and it’s contents compressed. The benefit to doing this, outside of saving space, is that files could potentially be accessed faster on slower storage devices.
As I’ve been trying to get the most out of some old storage devices I have, I think that something like this would be a great option for this. The only problem is that I’ve tried looking online for a way to do this but search engines are terrible. So, I’m posting about this here in case someone knows of a way to do this.
Edit: I forgot to specify this but I’m trying this for gaming. I know it’s not recommended to this but as a result, I mostly need something that’s not read-only. It might work fine for some games but this obviously wont work for all games.
This is at file system level… Checkout btrfs and zfs, I am quite positive both can compress like you want.
Never used this feature myself, so cannot be more specific.
Also, there are some read-only compressed filesystems for Linux that you can also use, they offer best compression but data is read only.
Okay, I’m having a bit of a problem. I tried the smallest device first but it’s too small for btrfs and I can’t figure out how to format devices in zfs. Unless xfs is the same as zfs, the option isn’t available in gparted and mkfs gives an error saying that the zfs file doesn’t exist. If it’s possible to install zfs through apt, “apt search zfs” gives a lot of results for zfs.
How small is that device??? Didn’t even knew btrfs has a minimum size.
After for zfs, you probably have to install some software or kernel patches
It’s 128 MB, brtfs needs at least 256 MB. Also yes, I’m aware that I’d need to install something to use zfs but I don’t know where to look to find out what I’d need to install.
Huh. My computer allows me to format a 128MB image file with brtfs. It won’t do it at 64MB though.
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Good call. Seems minimum for ZFS is three quarters of a Gigabyte, anyway. And definitely not made for what OP does 😆
How are you trying to format the device? I got that error message when using gparted.
truncate -s 128M fs.img parted fs.img mklabel gpt mkpart primary btrfs 1MiB 100% quit sudo losetup --find --partscan --show fs.img sudo mkfs.btrfs /dev/loop0p1You should be able to skip the loop device stuff and work on an actual device instead. Seems to me the limit is somewhere between 64M and 128M.
Edit: But as edinbruh said, maybe try f2fs if it’s a flash device, that’s probably a bit more lightweight?! And since I don’t know what you’re doing… If it’s embedded stuff and you’re alright with read-only, you might want to use squashfs.
I got brtfs working on a different storage device but I can’t tell if I set it up properly or not. I’m using the documentation that another user posted but it’s a bit confusing to me and I need to test it more.
For my 128 MB sd card, I am trying f2fs because that’s working. It does seem to write much faster than it did with ext4 but it seems to take up more space and it now has about 25% less free space, and it doesn’t seem to compress files. I’ll have to do more testing before I determine whether this what I go with or not.
As for squashfs, I probably don’t want that.
Remember to enable it. Usually the Arch Wiki is a great resource to learn stuff: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/F2FS
And don’t forget to back up your data if you’re messing around with your computer. One typo with the device names is enough to accidentally delete your harddrive.
If it’s a flash memory (sd card, usb stick, ssd, etc), you could try f2fs, it’s very light, and it supports compression and is meant specifically for that kind of devices (well, more for ssds).
But judging your experience from your comments, I suggest you don’t delve into niche filesystems until you have more experience with Linux, especially for something like 128MB. I especially suggest you avoid zfs for now.
It is an sd card and I did just format it to f2fs but how do I enable the compression? It does seem much faster that ext4 but it seems to also take up more space on the sd card, as I’ve lost about 25% of the free space after formatting it, so I’d like to enable the compression.
As for zfs, I have been using Linux for over a few years at this point but I’ve mostly been avoiding some of the more complicated stuff. So if it is more complicated than what I originally thought, then I’ll avoid that for now as well.
So, first of all, there is no gui for this, that I’m aware of, so you will have to do it from terminal. Second, on f2fs, compression works that you don’t enable compression for a folder, instead you mount the drive with compression enabled, and new files will be compressed automatically.
So what you need is to set up your disk to be mounted with compression. There are many paths you can follow here. If you want your drive to be (almost) permanently connected, the easiest way is to use “/etc/fstab”. If you want to use it as a regular SD card, mounting and ejecting it from your file explorer etcetera, then you should go here and learn how to have udisks2 mount your device with compression, which should be what your desktop environment uses to mount drives. I suggest you set that up for your specific device, and not for all f2fs devices. Good luck.
You can look up other useful f2fs options on the arch wiki. I suggest you add all those options that reduces writes to your disk and improve durability (like lazytime).
You should use zstd as compression algorithm, and because this is a slow and small drive, you can crank up the level of compression.
If you manage to pull this off, the next time you install a (bigger and faster) drive on your pc, you can try to look into zfs.
Huh. My computer allows me to format a 128MB image file with brtfs. It won’t do it at 64MB though.
Xfs and zfs are two different filesystems.
Okay, I can try both of those out.