Using modern compressing/decompressing tools like zstd for backups?

[EloB]

🚀 Proposal: Use Zstandard (zstd) instead of gzip for backups

Summary

Dokploy currently uses gzip (.tar.gz) for backups (databases, volumes, and full system backups).
While this works reliably, it’s now a performance bottleneck — especially on servers with modern multi-core CPUs.

Switching to Zstandard (.tar.zst) would provide smaller backups, faster compression/decompression, and better CPU efficiency, all while maintaining wide compatibility.

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📊 Benchmark Comparison

Metric	gzip (-6)	zstd (-3)	zstd (-9)
Compression ratio	~2.5–3×	~3.5–4×	~4.5×
Compression speed	30–50 MB/s	200–400 MB/s	100–200 MB/s
Decompression speed	~100 MB/s	600–1000 MB/s	600–900 MB/s
Multithreading	❌ No	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Typical 10 GB backup	4.2 GB (120 s)	3.1 GB (28 s)	2.8 GB (40 s)

Result:
→ ≈25–40 % smaller files
→ 3–6× faster backups
→ 10× faster restores

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⚙️ Why zstd is ideal for Dokploy

1. Multi-core aware — perfect for Dokploy environments (most run on 2–8 vCPU).
2. Fast restores — crucial for disaster recovery.
3. Modern standard — used by Docker, Facebook, Git, and systemd for compression.
4. Simple migration — only requires changing the tar command and installing zstd in the container.

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🧩 Suggested Implementation

A minimal change to existing backup logic:

tar --zstd -cf backup.tar.zst /some/path

Restore remains equally simple:

tar --zstd -xf backup.tar.zst

tar already includes --zstd support in all modern Linux distributions.

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✅ Benefits

• Smaller backups (save storage & S3 costs)
• Much faster backups/restores
• Better resource usage on multi-core hosts
• Simple implementation

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🗣️ Discussion

Would the team be open to adding zstd as an optional (or default) compression method for backups?

If desired, I can help draft a PR that updates the backup script logic and Dockerfile dependencies.