Automatic file compression?

[Marc Unangst]

brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
[automatically compressing files transparantly]
> Anyone want to try to stick this into RFS?

This is a bad, bad idea, for the same reason that compressing backups
before writing them to tape is a bad idea.  The difficulty of
recovering a trashed filesystem increases by several orders of
magnitude when you need to reconstruct a compressed file; in fact, I'd
say it's almost impossible to recover the undamaged portions of a
compressed file (especially if it was the key table that got trashed).

Maybe your disks never fail.  But mine do on occasion, and I like to
have at least half a chance of bringing my data back.

--
Marc Unangst               |
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