Yeah, I don’t want to waste my time trying other options. As I said before, it’s working fine the way it is. There’s around 120MB of free space and I was able to fit a little under 250MB worth of files with the folder I used for testing, so this seems pretty as good as is.

Also, this part isn’t directed at you specifically, but I’m thinking about just deleting my post. It seems like a troll is trying to use my post to effectively harass me by both misinterpreting some lines in my original post and using some others to belittle me. Because I don’t want to deal with them and possible others, I think it’s best I just delete my post. I may also step away from this site for a bit, I dealt with this kinda shit on Reddit and I don’t want to deal with it here.

I don’t think that will be necessary. It’s working how I set it up and I don’t want to mess around with other settings.

Even though the “nospace_cache” option isn’t working, the rest of what you mentioned worked fine and there’s about 120MB of free space now, which is most of the device. I’m not sure if nospace_cache is worth trying to get since BTRFS only uses about 5MB of the device now. Also, with the files I was testing, I was able to get almost 250MB onto the device, which is better than what I think I would have gotten with F2FS.

Anyways, thanks for helping me.

I tried that but it wont mount if I add nospace_cache. It’ll mount with:

sudo mount -o compress=zstd:15 /dev/mmcblk0p1 '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'

But if I add nospace_cache to this command, it’ll give me an error saying “mount: bad usage”.

I actually already looked at both but neither of them have formatting instructions. They just provide instructions for using SquashFS as if it was an alternative for archivemount.

Also, I’m currently not considering archivemount either. I tested it a few months ago but it corrupted the compressed file I was using, so I don’t think I’d want to use that.

I can try that but I can’t find any instructions on how to format a device for squashfs. Can you link me to something I can use?

I would use that but I’d prefer something that isn’t read-only. Since I’m using it to run games, I’m going to need write access for a lot of them.

The free space that I mentioned is both what Linux Mint’s file manager states and is what both files systems can hold on the SD card when compression is disabled. If I format the device to BTRFS and disable compression, I can only put 40MB of files onto the SD card. If I format the SD card for F2FS, it can hold about 80MB worth of files. If I format the SD card to BTRFS but enable compression, it says 40MB but it can hold around 100MB worth of files (at least with the files I’m testing). From what I’ve read and seen, if I can get compression working in F2FS, it’ll still say 80MB but probably hold around 200MB of files since, according to the documentation, both file systems support the same compression methods.

That’s not what I’m doing, I’m not trying to archive the games. Did you not read the last part of my post? I literally said that I’m using it to run games from these older devices, not archive them. I use an external hard drive for archiving them if I need to keep them long term.

Also, believe it or not, but a lot of the games I have are not already compressed that well. I have games that are normally over 4GB that I’m now able to run from a 1GB flash drive because I can use BTRFS’s transparent file compression to compress them well enough to be ran from that device and they do run decently well like this.

I checked dmesg and there’s no errors. As I said in my post, I’m not getting any error messages, so I have nothing to diagnose the problem with.

When I format the SD card to BTRFS, it only has about 40MB of free space available. But when I format the SD card to F2FS, it has about 80MB of free space available.

It’s because I’m trying to preserve my hard drives. Also, believe it or not, a lot of the games I have are not already compressed that well and I have games that are over 4GB that will now fit on my 1GB flash drive because of BTRFS’s transparent file compression and they run decently this way. Obviously, not all games are like this, there’s only a few that can be compressed that well, but it does seem like the average might be closer to 2 to 2.5 GB for the games I have, which is still much more than I was expecting.

On a side note, this kind of comment is the exact reason I was considering not posting this. I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I hate it when people are like “why do something this way when this way is better”. I chose to do this, this way, because of the reason I mentioned above. If I was some billionare, like Jeff Bezos, not only would I be using SSDs exclusively, I wouldn’t be playing games on a 200$ laptop that I bought refurbished from Amazon. I’m unemployed and my only means of making money is through online sites which don’t pay well, I’m trying to do what I can with what I have.

I’m only seeing the boot drive and the swapfile even though the SD card is mounted and working. Do I have to manually add a new entry somewhere in this file?

Also, no it is different. If I format the SD card to BTRFS it only has 40MB of free space, while it has about 80MB of free space when formatted to F2FS. I’d be getting double the free space if I can get compression working in F2FS.

I got it from my mom’s old camera that she bought in the 90s. She had no use for it, so she gave it to me over 10 years ago but then I had no use for it so I just took the SD card out and decided to use it for whatever I could think of.

No, it’s not that. When I format the SD card to BTRFS and enable file compression, the files are getting compressed when I move them to it. It’s just F2FS that I’m having issues with.

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I did rewrite my post a little bit ago, it probably wont change your question though. Basically, what I meant was that I wanted to be able to run the most games from each device. Not as in hold the most games at a time, but more so hold a bigger game than it previously could while also being able to potentially load all games faster just in general. It just so happens that compression is capable of both in the right context, and in a way, it would also prolong the longevity of the devices as well, even if that’s not my main intention.

I know that BTRFS can do this as it’s specified here and that works for me. But I was also told that F2FS could do this as well and I was linked to here. BTRFS is fine for most of my devices but there’s one device in particular that doesn’t have much space left when it’s formatted for BTRFS and therefor I’d like to get the compression in F2FS working if possible. Although, if I did get the compression in F2FS working correctly (assuming I wasn’t lied to), that’s probably what I’m going to end up using for most of my devices since most of them are flash storage devices.

I’m not sure what the differences are between them but what I’m looking for, BTRFS calls “transparent file compression”. I want the files to be compressed when added to the device but still fully accessible as if they aren’t. As I stated in my post, BTRFS supports this and I was able to set it up. I was told by multiple users that F2FS also supports this but if it does, it’s not working for me.

I’ve gotten BTRFS to work and I’m going to use that for most of my devices. I’m not sure if I’m going to use ZFS though, the documentation that I was given for how to use it seems to be written from the perspective of someone who already knows how the it works and not from the perspective of someone who doesn’t, so I’m very confused by it.

I’d like to get F2FS working on one of my devices though, but the commands needed to enable compression don’t seem to be working for me and I’m not getting any error messages so I have no idea how to fix it.

Is it read-only, or does it write the files at some point?

I apparently already have it installed but mkfs still thinks that zfs isn’t available. Am I supposed to use something else?