Synology compress video files series#
Synology compress video files download#

The compression here is transparent in that it isn’t noticeable to the user, except possibly for a small increase in CPU load during file access. This works because the filesystem selectively decompresses only the parts of a file that you access and makes sure to compress them again as it writes changes to disk. However, they are stored with compression applied on disk. Here, compressed files still look like regular uncompressed files to the user. Transparent compression on the other hand takes place at the filesystem level. Clearly there is something better than that! Moreover, you end up (de)compressing parts of the file that you didn’t intend to touch in the first place. This is not only a tedious process, but also temporarily defeats the space savings you had achieved previously.

While this provides space savings, depending on the file content, it has a major drawback: When you want to access the file to read or modify it, you have to decompress it first. This is usually an explicit operation: You take a compression utility and let it operate on your file. You can compress files with compression algorithms such as gzip, xz, or bzip2. Transparent compression explainedįirst, let’s investigate what transparent compression means. Ideally, this will solve your storage problems while requiring hardly any modification to your system at all! Let’s see how. In this article I’ll investigate another solution to this problem: transparent filesystem compression, a feature built into Btrfs. While storage space is steadily becoming cheaper, an increasing number of devices are either manufactured with a fixed amount of storage or are difficult to extend by end-users.īut what can you do when storage space is scarce? Maybe you will resort to cloud storage, or you find some means of external storage to carry around with you.

Synology compress video files download#

Maybe you want to download a large file from the internet, or you need to quickly copy over some pictures from your phone, and the operation suddenly fails. Most of us have probably experienced running out of storage space already. In case you missed it, here’s the previous article from this series: Introduction

Synology compress video files series#

This is part of a series that takes a closer look at Btrfs, the default filesystem for Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Silverblue since Fedora Linux 33. This article will explore transparent filesystem compression in Btrfs and how it can help with saving storage space.