BEES

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

About bees

bees is a block-oriented userspace deduplication agent designed for large btrfs filesystems. It is an offline dedupe combined with an incremental data scan capability to minimize time data spends on disk from write to dedupe.

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 to free more disk space
Persistent hash table 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

Weaknesses

Whole-filesystem dedupe - has no include/exclude filters, does not accept file lists
Requires root privilege (or CAP_SYS_ADMIN)
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

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).

Zygo/bees