I modified the Pack Size to be about 250MB (most of my files are immutable and are between 100MB-2GB in this repo) and have been using it for the last month. I’ve stored about 4.7TB with it and haven’t had any issues so far doing multiple backup, check, prune or restore commands. I did note that using ‘mount’ crashed out every time but it may not be anything to do with the Pack Size, I haven’t tried mount on the official binary.
I haven’t tried to restore using the official binary yet to see what happens, but it didn’t look like a restore would complicate anything, only the commands that write.
Observations so far…
- File Count: As expected, far fewer files. So that’s good.
- Transfer Rates: Much quicker sending to Google Drive and Wasabi.
- Check Times: Seem a little quicker, but Pruning still took a few hours surprisingly.
- Waiting Times: It seems like packing has to finish before an upload can start, so I end up with a longer idle time between each transfer while the packer works. Means the overall transfer rate takes a hit, but its still better. (would be good to have the packer doing the next pack while the upload is going, or upload as its packing like Duplicacy)
- Moving the Repo: Using Rclone to download the whole repo was massively faster because of the Pack Size too. But moving it between a local machine and a NAS was where it really helped because those transfers were not parallel.
So far so good. I plan on using this moving forwards at least for this Repo and the few others I have that are mainly immutable.
Note:
Its worth noting, I started the repo from scratch again after I modified the pack size. I did not continue and existing one.