virtualbox.org

Hello,

Does the CloneVDI tool compress BTRFS and XFS ?

Thanks for any information,
mike2712

You mean compact, not compress (*). But no, neither of those is a supported filesystem in CloneVDI. You can however compact any filesystem by zero filling first, then cloning. Zero filling can usually be done by copying from /dev/zero to a big file. When the process errors out it has exhausted disk space hence it's done. Delete the big file (leaving behind a lot of zero filled sectors) and clone.

WARNING: the above outlines the kludgy old pre-CloneVDI way of compacting a disk. The main downside is that a dynamic VDI will expand to maximum size because the process involves writing to every sector in the partition.

Why choose a niche filesystem? Surely the lack of tools and support is a natural consequence? I can't believe you're still using a system where these were the default.

(*) Compression retains all data, compaction reduces size by discarding unwanted data.

I take your point about the difference, I apologize for my mistake ("compress"). I might try zero filling (I used to do this before your nice tool became available), but I wonder if it is worth continuing. The file systems I mentioned are new in openSUSE Leap, the latest version....so I am not "still" using them. Earlier versions had ext4 by default. The Leap default can be changed to ext4, however, but Leap has the new KDE5 which is causing me a lot of problems in Virtualbox and does not (yet) seem to be totally supported.