I have an anecdote about compressed data.

When I studied at school, I used ZFS with lz4 enabled on my working machine. During that times I had a task of parsing Wikipedia's data. I had enough brain cells to find compressed dumps and download them with aria2 but not enough to leave the file compressed. I ran a decompressor. It'd been taking longer than I expected so I went out to walk a dog.

Imagine how fast me and the dog ran back 30 minutes later when I realized how cooked I was. I only had 10 GB left on my disks after I downloaded that 20 GB file. This decompressed file would have blown the machine up. I was terrified to find a frozen system with no storage space left.

Instead, the process finished and `df -h` reported 8 GB of the free space left. Files were decompressed. I could `less` them! That made no sense! Only many many minutes later I finally figured out to run a `zfs get compressratio` command which showed ZFS successfully and transparently recompressed everything on the fly. That was too impressive for that teenager and he never switched to a different file system.

Solaris has had so many cool features, like ZFS or doors. What I liked about ZFS is you coul make snapshot, which is basically the solution to how to treat data files a single, cheap to access unit, yet still use standard apis for file management, great for containerizing apps, making copies for experiments, or shipping stuff. Node.js just received this as a bespoke, app-level feature. But these things are too many to count, and make a ton of sense if you know how filesystems actually work. useful Also copy-on-write, temp overlays.

Sun was a really cool company.

\[T]/