On Sun, 29 Sep 2013, James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Actually, revisiting the feature list of BTRFS the 'some point' might be now. Compression seems particularly attractive as that would take some load off of the backup client machines
I'm running Debian Wheezy, so I assume I want the 3.10 kernel from backports.
I don't think that you can ever expect filesystem compression to compete well with application level compression. Filesystem compression is based around the expectation of random access while much application compression is based around entirely compressing large files due to the application/user knowing that random access isn't required. But if you want random access and compression then filesystem compression apparently works well. I'm not even sure if I have compression enabled on my systems, the data I'm storing on BTRFS isn't going to compress well anyway. For Debian you want a newer kernel than is available in Wheezy. The Wheezy kernel does work and if you avoid getting the filesystem anywhere near full then it will work well. But later kernels have many bug fixes. Don't use BTRFS RAID-5, that's no-where near usable. If you want data integrity and RAID-5 then there is no option other than ZFS at this time. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/