File/Folder Compression

[Drezard]

I know that windows has file/folder compression and I think it works great if you have a massive sized file server I can at least shrink the data down to 85%ish. Which when your running a file server of 5TB, its a good 750GB.

I'm wondering whether there's a Linux alternate to the windows file/folder compression, that doesn't involve tar and untar'ing every file modification.

Daniel

[lykwydchykyn]

I don't know of anything exactly analogous since ext3 doesn't support filesystem compression without a (unofficial and beta) patch.

You might want to look at avfs (http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mszeredi/avfs/), though I'm not sure immediately how to make use of it.

[insane_alien]

i think there are some FUSE fileystems that will allow on the fly compression but i'm not sure how good they are and i think throughput is quite poor.