Re: [gentoo-user] Compressed Filesystem

[William Kenworthy]

On Mon, 2009-12-28 at 12:58 +0100, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for a working and maintained compressed filesystem.
> I'd like to use it for backing up my root and my /usr filesystems,
> so that I can use rsync to keep it up-to-date.
>
> I've come across CompFused which seems to be just what I'm looking for,
> but it's buggy not maintained anymore.
>
> Similarly, fusecompress
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127433
> doesn't build on an up-to-date Gentoo system and doesn't
> look maintained either.
>
> There would be sys-fs/zfs-fuse but that sounds like overkill to me.
>
> Are there any other packages?
>
> Many thanks for a hint,
> Helmut.

Tried a few for this and besides the unmaintained part, they dont stand
up to the battering that rsync dishes out - regular corruption.

If you have space, look at dirvish (its in portage) on reiserfs.  Tried
it on ext2 and ext3 - more corruption but reiserfs3 with data=journal is
rock solid.  The devs reccomend not using a journaled FS for
performance, but I found it essential for my setup.

Dirvish takes the full size for the first backup.  Subsequent backups
create hard links to existing files so only differences show up as using
space.  After a number of backups, total size stabilises around 2x
original space unless you add some large files, or do an "emerge -ep
world" :)

Can be easily managed by cron and ssh keys including how many backups to
keep etc.  Can use on a local system, or more usually to a remote
machine.  Restore is as simple as copying the files back (though special
files an permissions need to be maintained so a simple copy isnt viable
for a full system restore.)

BillK