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Cake day: February 1st, 2023

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  • That is not a good method for testing. Maybe the filesystem still requires new files to be smaller than free space. Or maybe the file could be not really compressible, for example, you won’t be able to compress random data. You also won’t compress already compressed data, like videos.

    You could write a real text file of some kB and then check the compression ratio with something like “compsize”.

    The mount command mounts the disk with the options you give to it but only once. Now, because you don’t want to manually run mount everytime you use your disk, you must set it up so it is always mounted with the options you want. Udisks2 is one of the tools for that.

    edit: apparently compsize is btrfs only. You can use “du” with and without --apparent-size and check the differenze





  • So, first of all, there is no gui for this, that I’m aware of, so you will have to do it from terminal. Second, on f2fs, compression works that you don’t enable compression for a folder, instead you mount the drive with compression enabled, and new files will be compressed automatically.

    So what you need is to set up your disk to be mounted with compression. There are many paths you can follow here. If you want your drive to be (almost) permanently connected, the easiest way is to use “/etc/fstab”. If you want to use it as a regular SD card, mounting and ejecting it from your file explorer etcetera, then you should go here and learn how to have udisks2 mount your device with compression, which should be what your desktop environment uses to mount drives. I suggest you set that up for your specific device, and not for all f2fs devices. Good luck.

    You can look up other useful f2fs options on the arch wiki. I suggest you add all those options that reduces writes to your disk and improve durability (like lazytime).

    You should use zstd as compression algorithm, and because this is a slow and small drive, you can crank up the level of compression.

    If you manage to pull this off, the next time you install a (bigger and faster) drive on your pc, you can try to look into zfs.