BTRFS: Fun with BTRFS enabling compression

The initial reason reason for installing BTRFS was that I like the zfs features of snapshots, compression and deduplication.

Deduplication under btrfs is possible but somehow external and I don’t trust it until I was able to trash my system here. See here on how to do it and I will give it a try with a test system soon.

But compression my second important thing is working fine and is super easy.

All I did was to enable the compression flag under /etc/fstab and all newly created data will be compressed. On how the compression works please refer to here.

I edited the fstab to look like following:

vi /etc/fstab

UUID=f4705516-4eac-435c-920c-1f2be8fa07af /               btrfs   defaults,autodefrag,discard,clear_cache,compress=lzo,subvol=@ 0       1

UUID=f4705516-4eac-435c-920c-1f2be8fa07af /home btrfs defaults,autodefrag,discard,clear_cache,compress=lzo,subvol=@home 0 2

After a loads of updates and other messy stuff, it looks like the following.

# df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb4 25G 9.4G 15G 40% /

# du -sh /
11G /