Saving Space With fusecompress

I have been using a fuse compressed file system for a very long time now. Space used to be a bit tight on my old laptop's 60 GB hard drive, and the space savings haven't been hurting at all. I have about 4 GB of documentation stored in text, html, and pdf files that I like to carry with me. I also like having it indexed by tracker, which means it can't just be sitting in an archive.

I was previously using fuse-zip. It did its job very well and I really liked the fact that it was just mounting plain old standard zip files. It supported writes but it only committed changes when the file system was unmounted. That was very inconvenient and it took quite a while to recompress 1-2 GB of data when I was only adding a few MB worth of files.

Now I have recently switched to fusecompress. The only thing I dislike is that it does not use a standard archive behind the scenes. I'm using bzip2 as the compression method and I had to tell fusecompress that it was, in fact, OK to attempt to compress pdf files.

Since fusecompress compresses individual files I am not achieving quite as much compression as I was with fuse-zip, but it is quite close. I am don't mind trading a standard archive format for immediate commits of my writes.

See also:

• How I Reduced My Virtual Machine Disk Images By Over 75% With QEMU
• Experimenting with Compressed Swap
• Fix for Karmic Koala 64 bit Flash Plugin
• Saving Space With fusecompress
• Using QR Codes for Hardcopy Backups of Private Keys
• Achieving Better Compression with lrzip and rzip
• Testing btrfs Root File System on Ubuntu
• Automatically Configuring Multiple Heads with x.org
• Thoughts After Running btrfs for a Month
• Simple Automated btrfs Snapshots with btrfs-snap
• Linux Kernel 2.6.36 on the HP Pavilion DV8T
• Tweak btrfs-snap for More Frequent Snapshots
• My Backup Strategy for My Laptop
• btrfs - Six Months Later
• Disable the 'Resize Window Grippers' in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
• My First btrfs Failure and the State of Ubuntu's btrfs Support
• Supplimenting btrfs-snap With apt-btrfs-snapshot