Richard Fish write: > From what I can tell, there are no really good compressing filesystems available currently.
I would disagree, Squashfs is an advanced read-only compressing filesystem, which uses numerous techniques to obtaIn high compression ratios while also being fast. Some of the techniques (compressed metadata, use of fragment blocks, indexed compressed directories) I doubt you'll find many places elsewhere irrespective of the operating system. What I would agree with is there is no commercial support for compressing filesystems, which at a time where the major improvements to the Linux kernel are (arguably) being driven by the Linux distribution vendors, is a major limitation. Unfortunately, embedded systems vendors tend to simply use what is there, and the others are mainly focussed on the enterprise which is why there's a lot of enterprise scale and clustering filesystems about. > But why do you need to do this in the filesystem? Why not use a > compressible format for your backups like tar, cpio, or (my favorite) > dar? So you can mount the filesystem and transparently access the files as if they were uncompressed. Phillip Lougher -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/What-can-I-use-for-a-compressed-file-system--t1604870.html#a4363501 Sent from the gentoo-user forum at Nabble.com. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
