Freenas Heavy compression for data archiving

[rwslippey]

Good morning,

I recently got my NAS running for my home and small business. currently I'm running an i3 540 with 12 GB RAM and 6 2TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration.

My question is, by default FreeNas uses lz4 compression, I know that deduplication is very intensive and I don't believe I have a need for it.

What I'd like to accomplish is a dataset used specifically for archiving files I need to keep but I don't access very often, if ever at all. Think printed PDFs of license keys, PDF tax records, book keeping files from years past, my copyright registration documents (.xsls, pdf) ect. All stuff I'll rarely ever access but still, in some cases need to keep by law.

I'd like to keep this stuff in a dataset using heavy compression. Is this a bad idea? Are their any alternatives?

If accessing these files takes a little extra time due to the compression I'm not really that concerned. I just don't know how much I'll gain or how much system load would be added.

Does anyone else have any other ideas for creating a document archive for old documents?


Thanks

 

[Mirfster]

Don't really see anything really wrong with this. While I don't compress PDFs personally, I don't image the gains would be that great though.

 

[rwslippey]

Thanks for your reply. I kind of figured their might not be much to gain. I should note that not all of files are PDF but most are. I'm not well versed in compression so maybe it isn't even worth it.

 

[Mirfster]

Well, here is a quick test I just did... Grabbed a PDF with original size of 48KB. Compressed it to a zip using 7Zip on "Ultra" compression (the highest they offer). Resulting zip turned out to be 44KB. So it results in about 8.5% gain in space. Not saying this is an "apples to apples" comparison, just some info.

 

[mattbbpl]

Well, here is a quick test I just did... Grabbed a PDF with original size of 48KB. Compressed it to a zip using 7Zip on "Ultra" compression (the highest they offer). Resulting zip turned out to be 44KB. So it results in about 8.5% gain in space. Not saying this is an "apples to apples" comparison, just some info.

PDF files are normally already pretty compressed. The type of compression used internally can vary, but it's usually present in some form.

 

[rwslippey]

Well, here is a quick test I just did... Grabbed a PDF with original size of 48KB. Compressed it to a zip using 7Zip on "Ultra" compression (the highest they offer). Resulting zip turned out to be 44KB. So it results in about 8.5% gain in space. Not saying this is an "apples to apples" comparison, just some info.

Well that pretty much says it all.... Not worth the trouble. I guess I'll just toss up an archive dataset with what needs to be archived in it and call it a day. I don't see much to gain out of increasing the compression level. thanks for your testing and thoughts. PDFs are probably the primary file type that would be held , except maybe the oddball excel document or something.

thanks again

 

[Ericloewe]

Well that pretty much says it all.... Not worth the trouble. I guess I'll just toss up an archive dataset with what needs to be archived in it and call it a day. I don't see much to gain out of increasing the compression level. thanks for your testing and thoughts. PDFs are probably the primary file type that would be held , except maybe the oddball excel document or something.

thanks again

Office 2007+ files are also compressed. In fact, they're just fancy zipped folders with the document's stuff in them.

 

[mattbbpl]

Office 2007+ files are also compressed. In fact, they're just fancy zipped folders with the document's stuff in them.

In a past life I had to create a system that automatically created/modified these things, and I never get tired of the reaction I get when changing the extension of a broken one from "docx/xlsx" to "zip", opening up the XML within, fixing the broken element, restoring the original extension, and popping it open.

It breaks peoples' brains.

 

[rwslippey]

In a past life I had to create a system that automatically created/modified these things, and I never get tired of the reaction I get when changing the extension of a broken one from "docx/xlsx" to "zip", opening up the XML within, fixing the broken element, restoring the original extension, and popping it open.

It breaks peoples' brains.

Honestly , never knew that......

learn something new every day...