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It’s sort of been said before (and lost in the thread at this point), but this is not a “one thing” issue.
So why “zip” them?
- They might already be in an archive format. (We won’t mention downloading and torrenting here…
) - You want a portable, single file with its own integrity check that is not dependent on ZFS (to transfer / store elsewhere).
- You want to contain thousands of related files into a single archive file (hence, less metadata burden on the ZFS filesystem), where each file within still retains its own checksum.
- You want to be able to handle whatever format comes your way, be it 7z, RAR, Zip, regardless of multivolume, encryption/password-protected, or being a newer version format.
And if you don’t ever use it, then you’ll have have an additional 2 MiB on your boot-pool for a tool that you still can end up using later, while those who gain from its function can use it without the need to transfer files over the local network, use a VM, or use a container just to run this binary.
It’s like @patrickkeane said earlier. This isn’t that deep of a request.
The topic title is still a bit misleading. No need for “unrar”. Just 7z, of which the packaged / dynamically linked version consumes a couple of MiB. (The “portable” statically linked version is around 3.5 MiB, which is not needed if 7z will be included with SCALE by default.)
My question was specific about his VM images 
I’m interested in particular in the compression differencies between ZFS and 7zip/unrar.
Yeah, well my answer was specifically about…
What I meant to say is that the way you’re phrasing it is… WHOA!!!
Look behind you! Is that a UFO? No, I’m serious. Up in the clouds above the-
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I am new to TrueNAS so there might be other elements at play here but trying to extract and transfer a 3TB .7z file on client side is EXCEPTIONALLY slow and will take like 2 days to do. Why can I not just transfer the .7z file to the NAS via FTP and extract it there?
Or… you could just transfer the .7z file to the client and then extract it there instead of over the network? What’s stopping anyone from doing that?
Time and disk space
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