[Lammy]

It's for when you have a very large number of mostly-identical files, like web pages with consistent header and footer. If 408MiB versus 3.8GiB is a meaningless difference to you then sure don't bother with compression, but why I want it should be very obvious to most people here.

[nicman23]

you completely missed what i asked you but ok

[Lammy]

I don't think I did, but please explain :)

The last example in my list of four file sizes is them in a folder. Filesystem compression works at the file level, so you have to turn many-almost-identical-files into one file in order to benefit from it. ZFS does have block-level deduplication, but that's it's own can of worms that shouldn't be turned on flippantly due to resource requirements and `recordsize` tuning needed to really benefit from it.

[nicman23]

you do not need dedup just use reflinks for everything. if that workflow does not work then eh i understand why you would use zips

although zfs dedup is probably better in 2025