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.
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.
I read the page you linked to but I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. If it’s talking about using the “mount” command, I’ve already used that and even though I specifically enabled zstd as the compression method, files aren’t being compressed. I know this because I’m using a file that’s slightly larger than the free space but it’s still giving errors about not having enough space.