How The Backup Process Has Changed

How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Dec 8, 2007 1:52 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: How The Backup Process Has Changed by sitaram
Parent article: How The Backup Process Has Changed

Use none when
- almost all files in the dataset are already compressed (DUH!)

Major omission, both here and in the main article: also use none when your backup medium (and/or the path to it, including RAM) may have errors. Both compression and encryption largely destroy any ability to recover data past the error location. (I discovered two bad bits in 1 GB of memory while verifying a backup to DVD+R.)

Otherwise just use BZIP2

bzip2 is much, much slower than gzip on decompression, too. If it's read-once (or read-none), then that may not matter. But for read-many it's pretty bad. (I have no data on LZMA or other alternatives. Capacity is cheaper than CPU, however.)

Greg

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