mirror of https://github.com/Zygo/bees.git synced 2025-05-17 21:35:45 +02:00

Zygo Blaxell 82474b4ef4 docs: update front page

At least one user was significantly confused by "designed for large
filesystems".

The btrfs send workarounds aren't new any more.

Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>

2023-02-25 03:38:50 -05:00

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BEES

Best-Effort Extent-Same, a btrfs deduplication agent.

About bees

bees is a block-oriented userspace deduplication agent designed to scale up to large btrfs filesystems. It is a daemon that performs offline dedupe automatically as required. It uses an incremental data scan capability to minimize memory usage and dedupe new data soon after it appears in the filesystem.

Strengths

Space-efficient hash table and matching algorithms - can use as little as 1 GB hash table per 10 TB unique data (0.1GB/TB)
Daemon incrementally dedupes new data using btrfs tree search
Works with btrfs compression - dedupe any combination of compressed and uncompressed files
Works around btrfs filesystem structure issues to free more disk space than generic dedupe tools
Persistent hash table and checkpoint for rapid restart after shutdown
Whole-filesystem dedupe - including snapshots
Constant hash table size - no increased RAM usage if data set becomes larger
Works on live data - no scheduled downtime required
Automatic self-throttling based on system load
Low memory footprint (excluding the hash table)

Weaknesses

Whole-filesystem dedupe - has no include/exclude filters, does not accept file lists, terminates only when explicitly requested
Requires root privilege (or CAP_SYS_ADMIN) to work
First run may require temporary disk space for extent reorganization
First run may increase metadata space usage if many snapshots exist
Constant hash table size - no decreased RAM usage if data set becomes smaller
btrfs only (bcachefs and xfs are missing various features)

Installation and Usage

More Information

Bug Reports and Contributions

Email bug reports and patches to Zygo Blaxell bees@furryterror.org.

You can also use Github:

    https://github.com/Zygo/bees

Copyright & License

GPL (version 3 or later).

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