Re: compressed mode for tape drive

rfi_at_usa.com
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:02:22 -0400

I am pretty sure,a nd someone please correct me if i am wrong here-

Adding the z switch to tar causes it to compress over the entire tar
file, that is it is the same as creating a tar file and the
compressing the tar file.

I would much rather compress over each file, then tar the compressed
files together. This is a bit less efficent as all of the directory
contents of the tar file are not compressed.

The plus side is that any given error(s) will only hose the file(s)
the errors are in, and not the entire backup.

For casual use this is probabley not a big deal, but if you really
need to depend on your backups, and sometimes pull things back that
are years old, it is a consideration.

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 18:57:39 -0500, ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld
(Moe Trin) wrote:

>In article <417b7901$0$18659$626a14ce@news.free.fr>, Stef SM wrote:
>
>>Do you know if it is usefull to use compress (cvzf) when all the files you
>>backup are already compressed (with gzip for example) ?
>
>No, and often it makes the files slightly larger instead
>
> Old guy

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