NAME
bup-margin - figure out your deduplication safety margin
SYNOPSIS
bup margin
DESCRIPTION
bup margin iterates through all objects in your bup repository,
calculating the largest number of prefix bits shared between any two
entries. This number, n, identifies the longest subset of SHA–1 you
could use and still encounter a collision between your object ids.
For example, one system that was tested had a collection of 11 million
objects (70 GB), and bup margin returned 45. That means a 46-bit hash
would be sufficient to avoid all collisions among that set of objects;
each object in that repository could be uniquely identified by its
first 46 bits.
The number of bits needed seems to increase by about 1 or 2 for every
doubling of the number of objects. Since SHA–1 hashes have 160 bits,
that leaves 115 bits of margin. Of course, because SHA–1 hashes are
essentially random, it’s theoretically possible to use many more bits
with far fewer objects.
If you’re paranoid about the possibility of SHA–1 collisions, you can
monitor your repository by running bup margin occasionally to see if
you’re getting dangerously close to 160 bits.
EXAMPLE
$ bup margin
Reading indexes: 100.00% (11188299/11188299), done.
45
SEE ALSO
bup-midx(1), bup-save(1)
BUP
Part of the bup(1) suite.
AUTHORS
Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>.