Alan Cox wrote:
On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 01:54:24AM +0200, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
>If only I could use a compressed r/w filesystem for
>the backup disk, I'd save a few bucks. JFFS2 is
>the only mature filesystem that can do that, but
>it doesn't appear to be usable with very large
>partitions.
Not generally advisable. Lose a few bits and your compressed backup is rather
less than useful. JFFS2 is a special fs for flash so totally unsuitable for
disk media.
I've used JFFS2 on uClinux, and found it quite robust wrt
blocks with checksum errors. But, yes, JFFS2 isn't designed
for disk media.
I'm ashamed to admit that sometimes I envy NTFS's transparent
file compression. Yes, it's very slow for general use, but it
would be ideal for backups, old log files, etc.
ext2 has had an unsupported "compressed" attribute for years.
Perhaps it's extremely difficult to implement, but a very
desiderable feature that Linux still lacks.
--
// Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
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