This is not about the file system having compression or not, this is a feature or copy-on-write filesystems. And for the OPs use case, the generated file, can be compressed and sent over the wire. And this can be done outside of the locking step. So benefits are, faster backup, async compression relative to locking the SQLite file, no wasted space on disk, only very little extra storage required compared to copying the whole file verbatim in a none COW filesystem. Not only that, if space is really that much of a concern, I would compress into the target location directly, after NFS mounting it over the network, the local desk will have very little data written in the process.