Re: [ANNOUNCE] Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS

[Philipp Matthias Hahn]

Hello!

On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 08:04:57AM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 10:11:13AM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> > Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
> > > 
> > > I would also suggest one more feature: support for block level
> > > de-duplication. I mean:
...
> > > That would be very usable feature, which in most cases would allow to
> > > shrink occupied disk space on 50-90%.
> > 
> > Have you references for this number?
> > In my experience one gets a lot of benefit from
> > the much simpler process of "de-duplication" of files.
> 
> Yes, I would expect simple hard links to be a better solution for this,
> but the feature request is not that out of line.  I actually had plans
> on implementing auto duplicate block reuse earlier in btrfs.

One problem with hard-links for me is, they also share the meta-data,
especially file permissions and owners.

Take a Subversion checkout for example: For each file "$A" Subversion
saves a backup under ".svm/text-base/$A.svn-base" for file comparison
and diff generation. The user controls the file permissions of "$A",
Subversion protects its backup with 0444. You can't hard-link them,
because than "svn diff" doesn't work anymore if your editor doesn't
break the hard-link, or worse, your permissions can get wrong.

If previous versions Subversion also had an extra file for file
attributes (mime-type, permissions, to-be-ignored, etc.) Since most
files had no special attributes, each had a file only containing "END".
Those you could hard-link by hand to save space.

If somebody want to research this further:

There is this nice little package called "perforate", which contains
"finddup" to find duplicate files. Run it two times, once with "-i" to
ignore permissions while comparing file contents
	finddup -i -d /
and once without "-i" for "content and permissions must match"
	finddup -d /
This will give you a hint on how many files you could hard-link or how
many files share their content.

BYtE
Philipp
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