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.

  • tiptoes@sh.itjust.works
    34·
    5 hours ago

    The equivalent would be either zfs or btrfs compression. Transparent to applications, you don’t have to do anything special other than enable it.

    • vortexal@lemmy.mlOP
      7·
      4 hours ago

      As I mention in another comment, 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.

        • vortexal@lemmy.mlOP
          1·
          44 minutes ago

          I apparently already have it installed but mkfs still thinks that zfs isn’t available. Am I supposed to use something else?

          • ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
            1·
            17 minutes ago

            You’ll need to read the documentation to understand its concepts first. You don’t use mkfs but zpool to create a pool then use zfs to create the fs on it. ZFS is usually used with some sort of raid configuration so most doc will show this but you can create a pool with no replication using a single drive.

      • tiptoes@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        4 hours ago

        How small are these devices? I think the other problem is that neither BTRFS nor zfs really are suitable for removable devices, and definitely not for ones smaller than probably 8Gb at the very least.

        Unlike NTFS which is just a file system, both BTRFS and ZFS do volume management too, so it’s not just a single partition thing; they prefer to take over an entire volume and manage everything.

        So while they’re the closest filesystem with NTFS-like transparent compression……they don’t match exactly.

        I also hazard to guess if the devices you’re using are too small to accept a BTRFS formatted volume, no amount of compression is going to be enough to fit what you need.

        If you just want to play with a bunch of small old devices……maybe play with LVM and small RAID arrays and configurations instead. You can the build a bigger volume out of a bunch of those disks together and then put a BTRFS or zfs volume on them. Can be fun to experiment and learn with anyway.

      • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.worldEnglish
        5·
        4 hours ago

        How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn’t have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it’s copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb.

        ZFS meanwhile really won’t work well below probably 8gb. It’s also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems.

        If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want.

        BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result as the data is compressed into a smaller space and decompressed rapidly by the PC in memory), but NTFS can go be used on much smaller disk sizes due to how it works. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised with other benefits in mind. And NTFS compression isn’t well supported in Linux.