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README
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 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 - can use as little as 1 GB hash table per 10 TB unique data (0.1GB/TB)
Daemon mode - incrementally dedupes new data as it appears
Largest extents first - recover more free space during fixed maintenance windows
Works with btrfs compression - dedupe any combination of compressed and uncompressed files
Whole-filesystem dedupe - scans data only once, even with snapshots and reflinks
Persistent hash table for rapid restart after shutdown
Constant hash table size - no increased RAM usage if data set becomes larger
Works on live data - no scheduled downtime required
Automatic self-throttling - reduces system load
btrfs support - recovers more free space from btrfs than naive dedupers
Weaknesses
Whole-filesystem dedupe - has no include/exclude filters, does not accept file lists
Requires root privilege (CAP_SYS_ADMIN plus the usual filesystem read/modify caps)