On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 10:40:35PM +0100, Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) wrote: > John Goerzen wrote: > > > First, the on-disk compression format makes me nervous. It appears to > > use the deflate algorithm, but cannot be unpacked with either gzip or > > unzip. It would seem that the few bytes that adding a gzip header > > means would be well worth it, since it would buy the ability to > > extract it without using specialized tools. > > You can use the BackupPC_zcat binary to decompress individual files > manually.
Right, I'm aware of that. But that's a specialized tool. It requires CPAN libraries, libraries from BackupPC's perl library, etc. 20 bytes or so would get you something that gzip could uncompress. There's still the question of a CRC. > > > Secondly, I would love to be able to use bzip2 for the on-disk > > compression of each backup. It appears that bzip2 can be used for > > archives, but not the regular backups. Is this in the works anywhere? > > In my experience bzip2 is a much more resource intensive algorithm > than gzip. I wouldn't want to use that on my backups, they'd take > forever to compress. Sure, it's resource-intensive, but why not offer it? I've got a Core 2 Duo, and in tests using dar (similar to tar) with per-file bzip2 compression, it performs well enough and has a space savings in the neighborhood of 20% over gzip on my test set. It will certainly not be right for everyone, but why not the choice? -- John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
