I had been using bzip2 for compressing items. It was great – averaging a 9:1 compression of huge database exports. However, running 1 file at a time was taking way too long. Enter pbzip2 (parallelized)!

Since nas4free/freenas is based upon the freebsd platform, we can run the pkg_add to add this package. If you’re using the embedded version of nas4free, you may lose this install after a reboot or upgrade.

SSH to your nas4free box
pkg_add -r pbzip2

Make a symlink for ease of use
ln -s /usr/local/bin/pbzip2 /usr/sbin/pbzip2

Profit.

Now you can run “pbzip2” from anywhere in the shell.