Full-disk, fast, compressed backups and restoring, using MX Linux Snapshot and zstd

Please see this post:

In retrospect, I wish I would have put that content here…

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What degree of idiot am I if the idea of compressing backups or temporary clones has never even crossed my mind? :roll_eyes:

You’re not. I don’t do it either. No need, in my opinion. There’s very little, if anything I need outside of my home directory. This is by design, so that is all I ever backup.

Oh, I need the space. I just hadn’t considered the option before.

What I think zstd brings to the table, is that the compression is (very efficiently) multi-threaded, so that there is little time lost (compared to other compression algorithms out there) in compressing on the fly. The (default level of) compression of zstd is so fast and good that it’s worth going out of my way to use, IMHO.

The wicked speed of internal M.2 and NVME drives now, as well as external SSD’s in USB 3 enclosures (with a decent controller chip like a JMS578, which will write at about 200MB/sec, sustained), make for such fast full-disk backups (like 10-15 min for a 256GB M.2 drive), that why not just grab the whole gosh-darned disk in the backup?

Any empty areas of space on the disk getting imaged get crushed down to almost nothing, and this happens very fast.

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