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.
You could a filesystem that supports compression like ZFS or BTRFS.
Sounds like you’re looking for something like archivemount.
I tried that before but it didn’t work properly for me as the compressed files would end up getting corrupted.
The equivalent would be either zfs or btrfs compression. Transparent to applications, you don’t have to do anything special other than enable it.
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.
PM me if you need help with ZFS. I’ve gotten quite good at setting it up.
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.
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.
F2FS seems to do what you want, it’ll reserve the original size of your file but compress what’s actually written. Performance numbers might be massively inflated if your writes don’t saturate the cache in RAM.
I’ve used BTRFS on SD cards before and it’s mostly fine, but it will struggle massively if over 90% full, or if you have a < 1 GB volume and are, say, frequently updating a handful of files that together take up more than half its capacity. Mostly due to the CoW mechanism, it needs some headroom to make a copy of whatever files are being modified.
I figured out what I did wrong but now I’m getting a different error message. It’s saying “Error: Wrong features compress_algorithm=zstd” even though the page I was given says it should be possible. Any ideas on what I should do to fix that?
I’ve done some testing with f2fs and it does seem like what I want to go with but I can’t get compression working. Someone else linked me to this page but for some reason the command on that page gives an error message saying “Error: Failed to get the device stat!”. I already asked another user but assuming I can get it working, how would I change the command they provide to enable zstd compression. From what I’ve read, zstd is the compression method I want to be using.
The Compress attribute has been in even ext3 since day 1. I’ve never tried it, though.
If you are talking about what I think you’re talking about, that doesn’t do what I need it to. That just compresses the file(s) like a normal compression tool. I need something that will allow me to continue accessing the files as if they’re not compressed while keeping them compressed.
Not sure that’s relevant, but I’m playing around with Linux on some obsolete Windows tablets with cheap eMMC disks (one of which is broken, so I replaced it with a no name microSD card, plus USB drive), and I format my disks to f2fs, which theoretically should help with both keeping the disks for longer, and accessing the data faster.
I’ll have to test that out more later but I did format the sd card to f2fs and it did seem to write files very fast when I did a simple test. The only issue I’m seeing is that it has about 25% less space than it did when I had it formatted for ext4, is that normal for f2fs?
Make sure you’re actually filling the volume, and also keep in mind reporting may be different (with or without filesystem index metadata, etc)
Also, you can simply use regular file systems and compressed files, and then use a RAM drive (assuming you have enough RAM free) and access the files that way instead
I’m just going by what Linux Mint’s file manager says and it’s saying that the used space is about 40 MB with f2fs while it was about less than half of that when it was formatted to ext4.
What’s a RAM drive? I have 8 GB of RAM and I have ZRAM enabled, so I should have enough RAM for most of the files I’d consider using it for.
What are you saving on that drive? Many data file formats already have compression of their own and don’t benefit much from file system compression. So if this is for media files, for example, it’s likely to add CPU overhead without a big benefit in transfer speed.
ZFS is not installed by default with most Linux distributions due to its license. It’s something you install after the os. Btrfs should work, but I see some discussion online of 128 or 256MB minimum volume size.
I’m using it for games, I know it’s not really recommended to do that but I’m doing it anyways. I’m trying btrfs on one of my devices but I may need zfs for one of the others, however, I don’t know how to install it.
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.
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.
Just download more RAM.
There’s an interesting project called DwarFS. I have it on my todolist to check it out but as I understand it you basically create a compressed read-only archive that is mountable and readable just like any other disk - https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs . Maybe this is something for your use case?
Maybe for some things but because I’m using it for games, the “read-only” might limit what games I can use this with. I might still try it out though.
Funnily enough it’s often used in the pirate scene to distribute games. But only as archives.
Unfortunately I haven’t tested it so I cannot fully advise on that but I have seen some “repacks” on the high seas where a whole wine prefix with a game already installed was compressed to a single
dwarwhich you can mount and play with configs and saves in your ~.I know it’s not advisable, I’m just a little crazy.
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Compression.html
You know this takes 5 minutes with web search to find out? Or ask Le Chat.
I can tell that you didn’t read my post before commenting. But regardless, I’ll have to try that later as the device I’m testing first is too small for btrfs and I’m currently trying zfs first before I try one of my other storage devices.
Your skill of knowing what people did is as good as your skill of doing research I see.
And to really prove the point, Does Linux have any sort of “compress files to save disk usage” like in Windows? is the second Google result when looking for ‘Linux file system compression’ (so you no magical keywords necessary) and the first comment points to btrfs.
the device I’m testing first is too small for btrfs
