*Edit: I have figured out how to use BTRFS and enable what it calls “transparent file compression”, and I’m going to use that on most of my old storage devices. The only problem I’m having is that I want to use F2FS on my oldest storage device, as BTRFS takes up too much space on the device and I was told by multiple users that F2FS also supports transparent file compression, but I can’t get files to compress and I’m not getting any error messages to try and fix it. Based on what the documentation says, I’m supposed to do something like this:

sudo mkfs.f2fs -f -O extra_attr,inode_checksum,sb_checksum,compression /dev/mmcblk0p1
sudo mount -o compress_algorithm=zstd,compress_extension=* /dev/mmcblk0p1 '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'
chattr -R +c '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'

The device will mount like this but files aren’t compressing when added, nor are they compressed if using the last command after they’ve been moved.*

I’m rewriting the old portion for clarification:

In Windows, there’s a file/folder option called “Compress contents to save disk space”. What it does is it compresses the files, as the name suggests, but leaves them accessible as though they aren’t. This doesn’t really have much of a benefit on newer storage devices but on older storage devices, in addition to saving space, it allows files to potentially read faster.

As I have some old storage devices that I want to run games from, I think this will be a great option to have if I could find something similar for Linux. I tried looking online myself but search engines are terrible and I couldn’t find anything though them. So, I decided to post about this here, to see if anyone knows of anything I could try.

  • vortexal@lemmy.mlOP
    8·
    15 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·
        11 hours 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
          6·
          11 hours 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
      8·
      14 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
      6·
      14 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.