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Filesystem Compression

Posted by kprojects on · 5 comments
Linux.org; By Jarret Buse
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Many people know about compression by compressing a file to make it smaller for e-mailing. Others compress files to place on a small storage device such as a USB thumb drive or memory card. In these instances, a file utility is used to compress the data into a compressed format such as ZIP, RAR, TAR, and others.

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Comments (5)

When the goal of file system compression was fitting 20 documents on a floppy rather than 10, sure compression was a good idea.

However, look at file usage now. The big files are already compressed. Audio was the big one for a while, now it's video. These do not benefit from file system compression at all.

The people using huge raw (uncompressed) image files are also the kinds of people who will pay the extra $50 and get huge drives anyway.

All that said, I like full disk encryption. Privacy, don't you know.
And compression before encryption is a lot more effective than vice-versa, if the compression isn't a 1-to-1 algorithm.
On the system partition compression might be worthwile. All those pesky binaries and libraries can save you a couple of gigabytes :)
Like my ex, who told some freeloader in a chatroom to delete his C:WINDOWS folder to free up some space on his hard drive. And then told him to reboot.

When he finally came back in three hours later to cuss everyone out, she pointedly told him, "The reason for our existence is not to give you free tech support. Either learn what you're doing, or pay someone to fix your problems."
Free up disk space. Solve countless malware problems.

Sounds like a win-win to me!

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