Re: [coLinux-users] Smaller filesystems (gratuitous e2compr plug)

[Paul W. <Pau...@in...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason A. Pattie" <pat...@pc...>
To: "Paul Whittaker" <Pau...@in...>
Cc: <col...@li...>
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 12:53 AM
Subject: Re: [coLinux-users] Smaller filesystems (gratuitous e2compr plug)


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> Paul Whittaker wrote:
> | Note that you will need special e2compr-aware versions of ext2 tools
> | (e2fsck, chattr, etc) available from the e2compr.sf.net site.  Please
note
> | also that, although it has been around for many years, e2compr is
> considered
> | experimental and should not be relied upon for storage of anything
> | particularly valuable.  But then the same is true of coLinux, I guess.
>
> I had my company laptop setup once using e2compr to compress everything
> on it (I have a 10GB harddrive with only 4.5GB available to Linux).  I
> pretty much lost everything on it.  Major filesystem corruption occurred
> after using it for a few months.  I can't remember the exact details,
> but files started not being able to decompress, and I think some may
> have ended up being deleted as well.  So, unless there has been some
> major work done on e2compr in the past year or so, I probably would not
> rely on it.

It depends what you are doing.  I will happily admit to not daring to use
e2compr with my main Linux distro myself, but have had no problems
whatsoever with it in an embedded role with a very small number of files on
an initrd filesystem that gets reset to a known-good state every time the
machine boots.  My uses of coLinux are along the same lines.

Nitpick: e2compr cannot cause "filesystem corruption", because it doesn't
compress metadata (ie. directories, inode info).  It's not to blame for any
files that go missing.  At worst it can only result in corruption of file
contents.