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I'm not sure if you'll see this, but I have a question. I have a situation where I need to implement in-place compression with perfect rollback in case of failure. The first approach I thought of was feeding LZMA input until I had X amount of output, then finalizing and starting over, but then I started wondering if I could simply periodically serialize the LZMA state machine data every 30 seconds or so.

I haven't investigated either approach, but this is one of my next projects I'm working on, so I'll be figuring it out either way. I was wondering, does Zstd provide any ability to serialize/restore and continue where it left off?

(Context: Disk compression. Due to long-term factors beyond my control I've had severe disk space issues for over a decade (with frequently only tens of MBs free). Complex story ending in "cannot work". I recently realized that some of my disks contained data I didn't immediately need, and began wondering about ways I might be able to compress this data out "of the way" so I could carefully partition the remaining space. This would need to be done in-place as I would have nowhere with enough space to hold the compressed data, at least not to begin with.)




Lending/buying an empty (external) drive for starting seems to be much simpler and safer.


That would be a highly preferable option.

The last time someone gave me an old empty 320GB HDD they weren't using, one of my own disks started clicking about a week later and I was able to save everything on it. I still shake my head at that perfect timing.

Of course, this meant I lost all the additional free space, haha. One step forward, two steps back...




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