Hopefully this is my final edit before getting a full solution but I just want to say that if you are going to either resort to belittling me for not using better/newer hardware or you make it obvious that you haven’t fully read the post before commenting, I’m not going to respond to your comment.
Edit: I have figured out how to use BTRFS and enable what it calls “transparent file compression”, and I’m going to use that on most of my old storage devices. The only problem I’m having is that I want to use F2FS on my oldest storage device, as BTRFS takes up too much space on the device and I was told by multiple users that F2FS also supports transparent file compression, but I can’t get files to compress and I’m not getting any error messages to try and fix it. Based on what the documentation says, I’m supposed to do something like this:
sudo mkfs.f2fs -f -O extra_attr,inode_checksum,sb_checksum,compression /dev/mmcblk0p1
sudo mount -o compress_algorithm=zstd,compress_extension=* /dev/mmcblk0p1 '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'
chattr -R +c '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'
The device will mount like this but files aren’t compressing when added, nor are they compressed if using the last command after they’ve been moved.
I’m rewriting the old portion for clarification:
In Windows, there’s a file/folder option called “Compress contents to save disk space”. What it does is it compresses the files, as the name suggests, but leaves them accessible as though they aren’t. This doesn’t really have much of a benefit on newer storage devices but on older storage devices, in addition to saving space, it allows files to potentially read faster.
As I have some old storage devices that I want to run games from, I think this will be a great option to have if I could find something similar for Linux. I tried looking online myself but search engines are terrible and I couldn’t find anything though them. So, I decided to post about this here, to see if anyone knows of anything I could try.
“*Edit: I have figured out how to use BTRFS and enable what it calls “transparent file compression”, and I’m going to use that on most of my old storage devices.”
If the old data is meant to be archived then maybe do not mess with it that way and if you want it compressed use 7zip and other similar programs that are known and well tested. Also they should be stored on HDDs instead of SSDs, longer shelf life. If you have issues on your personal PC that is and lacking context, this question could be more advanced for NAS or servers which generally people do not know much about.
That’s not what I’m doing, I’m not trying to archive the games. Did you not read the last part of my post? I literally said that I’m using it to run games from these older devices, not archive them. I use an external hard drive for archiving them if I need to keep them long term.
Also, believe it or not, but a lot of the games I have are not already compressed that well. I have games that are normally over 4GB that I’m now able to run from a 1GB flash drive because I can use BTRFS’s transparent file compression to compress them well enough to be ran from that device and they do run decently well like this.