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

[david@lang.hm]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Chris Mason wrote:

>>> 3. De-de-duplicate blocks on disk, i.e. copy them on write
>>>
>>> I suppose that de-duplication itself would be done by some user space
>>> process that would scan files, determine blocks with the same data and
>>> then de-duplicate them by using syscall or IOCTL (2).
>>>
>>> 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.

with COW de-duplication you can merge things that have vastly different 
permissions. hard-links can't be used if different people have write 
permission.

David Lang