Hello all,
I was reading an article in Linux User magazine about Sabayon Linux and their use of the ZFS file system.
Supposedly the file system support deduplication which I thought could be useful if manually tidying up a photograph archive.
Has anyone on the list used the ZFS system or Sabayon Linux?
Any recommendations or experience?
Deduplication in this sense won't help you tidy up your photo archive. The filesystem will determine (in some manner) that the contents of block X are the same as block Y, and will free up the space occupied by block Y and replace it with a pointer to block X. The files remain unchanged: file A (with block X) and file B (with block Y) will still look identical, and you can still choose to delete or modify them individually. If you modify file B, then the new blocks written out will contain the full, unduplicated (as it is now unique) contents. The net result to you is that you will save the space (or at least some of it) occupied by duplicated photographs, but if at some point in the future you were to copy those photos elsewhere, eg to a filesystem that doesn't support dedupe, that space would be expanded out. If you do want to tidy up a photograph archive, you're better off doing something like creating a hash (md5sum, sha256, etc) of all the files, and then looking for duplicate hashes. Or you could use a tool like the ones mentioned in this thread: http://askubuntu.com/questions/4072/how-can-i-find-duplicate-photos. In a more general sense, I'm wary of the various efforts to get ZFS into linux. It's very unlikely to be included in the mainstream kernel in a hurry, due to licensing issues, and while some distros may offer it as a feature, it is limited in many ways (eg, with Sabayon, you can't easily install to ZFS). Further, once you've got your system onto a ZFS filesystem, you're reliant on the continued support of whoever got it there. With an in-kernel filesystem, you have far more support. It's a shame, I'd really like to be able to use some of ZFS's features, but I don't think it's ready in linux