Comments on: Lessfs-1.0.1 released.

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:11:31 +0000

Is the virtual tape file compressed?

By: Mike Collins

Mike Collins — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:24:27 +0000

I am trying to test this out with a backup solution called Bacula. I have compiled lessfs and mounted a lessfs filesystem. I have initialized Bacula to use the lessfs mount for it’s FileStorage type and have successfully backuped up data to it. I have seen no deduplication happen at all, which is interesting. The files are backup in a virtual tape file that lives on the lessfs mount. There is no encryption being used with lessfs or Bacula. Could it be an issue with the way that the data is represented in the virtual tape file? I have verified that if I copy regular files to the mount they are infact deduped correctly, just not the data in the virtual tape file…. Any thoughts?

By: maru

maru — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:15:42 +0000

Thanks, I it looks like the code that checks the directory structure can use some optimization. It now repeatedly walks through the whole database, which is well, suboptimal to say the least.

By: Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:42:56 +0000

It’s mixed. There’s thousands of several-k files in maildir folders, but there’s also photo-albums and music.

By: maru

maru — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:52:10 +0000

Do you have lot’s of small files?
I will look at it. fsck has not been optimized at all (yet).

Mark

By: John

John — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

I’m interested in trying lessfs out, but I’m having trouble getting started.

Questions:
1) Is there a user forum/mailing list for lessfs, or are the comments here filling that job?

2) I want to configure a NAS/lessfs VM in ESXi 4 that will only be used for backing up VMs. Where is the best place to start? What linux distro will give me the least issues with lessfs?

By: Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:46:52 +0000

Subject: Unreasonable lessfsck times?

So, I have a lessfs volume with a database currently about 60GB in size. Running lessfsck on it since 10pm last night. I expected the “optimize” phase to take a while, it did — about an hour. Phase 2, “check directory structure”, was less. But this morning, phase 3 “check for orphaned inodes”, is still running.

This isn’t viable in a production system.

By: PhracturedBlue

PhracturedBlue — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:41:28 +0000

I was not trying to hardlink a directory.
using cp -al seems to create a hardlink of all files recursively. In this case gzip is a binary which should have had the same inode, but in this case the inode is different.

I could be wrong on what is supposed to happen, but I’ve been using this code with ext3 for years and it has always generated the same inode for all files in the directory.

I’ll do some more experimentation

By: maru

maru — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:45:24 +0000

Would it be an option to just dd the whole partition to lessfs?
You can mount it with -o loop afterwards.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:50:32 +0000

400 mb of files still takes something like 2 minutes with SYNC_RELAX