this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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This is how I do it. I put my Steam directory in an external BTRFS drive with compression turned on. Works great, and allows me to take my library between computers.
You'd get even more savings using something like
beesbecause it does block level deduplication.What
beesdoes is build a hash table of every block on your ssd, and compares them. If it finds any matches, it will delete one and just place a pointer to the other where the deleted one was, the pointer being much smaller than the duplicate data block.Functionally, any installed games with shared assets get space savings. It's particularly helpful on with Steam games because of all the proton prefixes. Lots of opportunities for finding duplicate data blocks.
If you use snapshots, it can save even more.
Have you measured the difference? Is it huge? I’m curious to understand what the trade-offs are and how many more games can you store on the same drive.
Depends on the game. A title like dota will have a lot of savings (tens of gigabytes last I checked it). Most other games it seems don’t have obviously and easily compressible assets from a generic compression algorithm, and therefore will yield extremely minor savings.
Checked some installed games. DotA is down to 36 gb from 67. Almost 54% the original size.
RoboCop rogue city is 37->37gb. Negligible savings.
Btrfs is usually last in perf benchmarks, so I wouldn't do it myself
My main goals are efficient space usage and portability, so I've never measured anything. I'll get some stats for you.
I would appreciate even not very accurate comparison just to get the idea. A brief search meanwhile showed me it’s a great idea actually. But having someone who uses that to comment would be great too. Thanks.
I'll be away for a while, but I'll get some stats, because now I'm also curious.