Re: KDE compression options: tar, zip, or rar

[Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 09:48:00AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >> Thank you Osamu but I stress that compression / decompression time is
> >> not important for this application. That is why I asked on the list
> >> what the other advantages and disadvantages of the different formats
> >> are.
> >
> > Hmmm....  then stick with tar.gz since it is supported
> > everywhere on Unix.
> >
> > There are tools for interoperability and native tools. ...
> 
> That was my first inclination but I really would like to have the
> redundancies or rar.

This is an interesting point.  I see several redundancy tools like par2,
dvdisaster, ras, ...

 http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch10.en.html#_data_redundancy

(par2 seems to support similar feature claimed by rar and has many GUI
tools.)

> I think that 7zip supports this, I am looking into it. 

7zip support RAR for unpacking with non-free p7zip-rar package.

> I may just add 7zip support. 7zip is FOSS, too, so that is good.

but RAR module for 7zip is non-free.

FYI: I sometimes use data redundancy for some critical backups with
dvdisastar.  But I also find that the time to create redundancy data is
non-trivial.  I tend to make multiple copies as "REDUNDANCY" for backup
in most of time. Also, CD and DVD data are written to physical media
using Reed-Solomon FEC (forward error correction) thus inherently
somewhat redundant. I also used to care about partial recovery and used
afio with -Z option than any global compression like zip/tar.gz/tar.bz2.
Now I am just lazy tar.gz (or even without compression for speed).
Making backup is more important than how we do it!

Osamu