# Zygo/bees

Best-Effort Extent-Same, a btrfs dedupe agent

Repository: https://github.com/Zygo/bees
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/bees
Language: C++
License: GPL-3.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: btrfs, dedup, dedupe
Last push: 2026-05-03T22:42:35+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 68/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 80, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3576, "days_push": 122, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1014, forks 76 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:13.818320+00:00)

## What it is
bees is a userspace block-oriented deduplication agent for btrfs filesystems, written in C++. It runs as a daemon that incrementally scans and dedupes new data on live filesystems using a space-efficient persistent hash table.

## Use cases
- deduplicate a large btrfs filesystem to recover free space
- continuously dedupe new data as it is written without downtime
- dedupe data across btrfs snapshots and reflinks
- combine dedupe with btrfs compression
- run dedupe with minimal RAM using a constant-size hash table
- throttle dedupe load automatically during maintenance windows

## When to choose
- you run btrfs and want maximum free-space recovery from dedupe, including snapshots
- you need continuous background dedupe of live data rather than scheduled one-off runs
- you have large datasets and want a memory-efficient, persistent hash table
- you want dedupe that coexists with btrfs compression

## When to avoid
- your filesystem is not btrfs (bees is btrfs-only)
- you need include/exclude filters or per-file dedupe lists
- you cannot grant root privileges (CAP_SYS_ADMIN)
- you run an old kernel with known btrfs data-corruption bugs
- your dataset shrinks often and you need RAM usage to scale down

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: file-system, compression, developer-tools
- domain: files, self-hosted, operating-systems
- platform: cli, self-hosted
- tags: btrfs, deduplication, daemon, storage-optimization, extent-same, linux

## Member repositories
- Zygo/bees (main) score 68

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:13.818320+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:11:31.221498+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/Zygo/bees (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:13.818320+00:00, sha 234bca39c0c1)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.