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I've looked at the man page and documentation on fusecompress and I got a little confused. It looks like it mounts the compressed filesystem as I want, but not on the drive I want it. It seems to me that it just creates a temp mounting folder for compression.

What I would like it to do is take over one whole drive(or 2) that I use for data backup. For instance:

My os is on sdc

Backup1 is on sdd

Backup2 is on sde

I would like fusecompress to mount Backup1 & Backup2 as compressed filesystems. Can someone help me out with this? I feel like I'm just messing up the syntax.

P.S. It is totally acceptable for it to just be a folder inside of the sdd & sde drives that is compressed and mounted. End result is just 2 mounted locations that are fully compressed on both drives.

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I think you have to mount an initially empty directory to an empty mount point, then everything you copy to the mount point will be compresses on the original empty dir, but still appear and can be used as if were not on the mount point.

When you unmount with fusermount -u, the data remains in compresses state on the original directory. When you mount again it will be visible as if were not compressed on the mount point.

If you put something on the original directory it will not be compressed, being the mount active or not. Only data put on the mount point when the mount is active will be compressed.

So, to sum up the steps:

  • choose or create two empty directories (the first one will hold all real compressed data, so choose this one carefully);
  • run the command fusecompress first-dir second-dir
  • copy all data you want to compress to second-dir (you can move, instead of copy, if you so desire, and to free space)
  • when you're done, you can unmount with fusermount -u second-dir

be aware to never access directly first-dir, when you need to you have to mount again as in step 2.

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  • right, but that doesn't tell me how to set it up. Which is what I'm after. The man said it makes a "/foo" temporary directory where it does all the compression. I would like to affix this to an actual directory on sde or sdd.
    – Ctuchik
    Aug 15, 2011 at 18:06
  • @Ctuchik: maybe I was not clear. Now I have added some more information.
    – enzotib
    Aug 15, 2011 at 18:42
  • Ok, I figured that may have been the correct usage, but the man was confusing me with the"/foo" directory stuff and i wanted to make sure it would be on the other drive. I got it going now. The only aggravation now is that I put the mount point in the /media/ folder and it requires sudo to copy anything into there. I'll just hvae to fix that
    – Ctuchik
    Aug 15, 2011 at 19:24

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