[olug] Filesystem Compression

Andrew Embury drazak at ingenii.com
Fri Oct 29 15:39:35 UTC 2004


My problem with compressing in this fashion is the backups are rsync
based, so the uncompressed files need to be available to the rsync process
when performing additonal backups.

Drew

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Nick Walter wrote:

> I'm not aware of any mature products to do on-the-fly compression at the
> filesystem level for linux.
>
> What I typically do for backups is compressed tarfiles or simply
> individually compress the backed up files (with gzip).  A lot depends on
> how immediately accessible you need the backup data to be and how fast
> you need the backup to finish.
>
> For archival purposes, you could do the backup uncompressed and then
> compress it later once all the data is backed up.  Keeping backups of a
> filesystem quick reduces the headaches associated with an inconsistent
> snapshot.
>
> If there is no disk space available to do the backup uncompressed it is
> quite possible to copy a file and gzip it at the same time to achieve
> on-the-fly backup and compression in one step.  Here a quick and dirty
> little shell script illustrating how it might be done:
>
> for X in `ls /mydirectory/importantfiles/*`
> do
>   Y=basename $X
>   gzip -c $X|dd of=/mybackup/directory/$Y
> done
>
> Nick Walter
>
> On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 09:46, Andrew Embury wrote:
> > Is it possible to do compression on any of the major, stable Linux file
> > systems?  I'm working on a multi-terabyte disk-to-disk backup system and
> > would like to have on-the-fly compression enabled at the filesystem level.
> > The best I could find was an unsupported patch for ext2 that never seemed
> > to be integrated into the kernel.
> >
> > I'm running RedHat EL ES 3.  Stability is the #1 concern.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Drew
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>
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