Compression of specific paths?

[Shiroi Kage]

Is it at all possible to compress specific paths within a pool, or for files that are older than a specific date? I want to do some aggressive compression on some old files. My current option is using 7zip with LZMA2 on Ultra and do that manually. How do I automate that? Could FreeNAS apply compression to specific folders, or should I construct another pool and and set its compression to max and move files there once I want them to be archived for the longer term?

Thanks in advance.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Compression is a per dataset setting. No need for a whole different pool. Just create or modify a dataset.

 

[Chris Moore]

The default compression of ZFS on FreeNAS is LZ4 and that works pretty well. I can tell you that with the data we have at work, which is fairly compressible, LZ4 gives us almost 2 to 1 compression.
This is done by default on FreeNAS and there is no need to change anything to get it.

 

[Shiroi Kage]

Compression is a per dataset setting. No need for a whole different pool. Just create or modify a dataset.

I don't understand datasets very well, so please bear with me. Is it going to act like another partition? Does that mean I have to use a client to move files, or can I just set it so that files within a specific directory will be moved by FreeNAS automatically to the dataset where aggressive compression is applied?

 

[Shiroi Kage]

The default compression of ZFS on FreeNAS is LZ4 and that works pretty well. I can tell you that with the data we have at work, which is fairly compressible, LZ4 gives us almost 2 to 1 compression.
This is done by default on FreeNAS and there is no need to change anything to get it.

How do I check the compression efficiency for my files? Using properties on Windows shows the size on disk to sometimes be bigger for some very compressable files (like RAW photos for example), or have them get some very slight compression when LZMA can get them down to a 60% compression ratio. Is this is the correct way to check compression ratio?