Hi!
Trying to kill the keyboard, [EMAIL PROTECTED] produced:
> more compressed. I'm using "tar czf" to back it up, which uses gzip for
> compression. It takes about 2 hours to back up 4G this way, and another
Note that gzip is very bad if you use it for backups. Why?
Assume you have an error on the tape: one bit (or more) has
been flipped and the ecc cannot correct the error. According to
Murphy that will happen when you need the backup most.
Now, that of course will happen no matter if you use gzip.
But with gzip *all* of the following data (till the end of the tar
archive) is trashed beyond recovery. If you had a compression
method which would restart compression every new file or every
XX Kb you could at least recover the rest (the other files or
everything from the next block onward).
While bzip2 is a block compressor, the blocksize of 100 to
900 KB (-1 to -9) is much to large for backup purposes, IMHO.
afio for example compresses single files. I am sure that most
commercial backup products have similar methods.
Note that the "--compress-blocks" option of tar does *not*
compress in single blocks, but rather (according to my info-file)
"`tar' will pad the archive out to the next block boundary",
i.e. the output is a multible of the block size.
-Wolfgang
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