[H-GEN] Linux Backup

Christopher Biggs chris at epipe.com.au
Fri May 9 06:28:41 EDT 2003


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Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Getting back to compression, there is a middle path here - the zip utility
> compresses each file individually before archiving.  This is the reverse
> to tar.gz of course. If you zip each file before writing it to tape you
> will get some compression and still have the safety of individually saved
> files. In general zip does not compress as well as gzip or bzip2 of
> course.

Years back, when I was the sad victim^W^Wowner of a QIC-40 tape drive,
I used a version of GNU tar that was patched to compress per-file
rather pass the whole archive to gzip.  It was even
backwards-compatible-ish with standard tar, although you'd have to
gunzip each file manually after extraction if you restored with
vanilla tar.  

I'm sure that patch is probably still floating around on the net
somewhere.

--cjb


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