[rurban]

I have about the very same problems as mhx, several hundreds of huge perl versions which are almost the same, taking up enourmous amounts of diskspace. E.g. I had to move most of them from my SSD to a spinning disk. I really want to move them back.

Thanks to mhx I can move them now back to my fast disk. This is also perfect for testers.

[lambda_obrien]

If they're almost the same, could you use one git repo with different branches for each version? Or archive them with restic into a folder and restore which one you need each time. Either method should deduplicate data if they're mostly the same file structure and content.

Edit: You could even have several read only shadow copies of the repo for parallel working directory usage, if your hard link the .git directory except for the HEAD ref in each.