Re: compressor

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2012 21:40:36 +0800, lina wrote:

> Basically which compressor is the most efficient one.

Ha, that's like asking "what do clouds smell like"? >:-)

> I got 2T data, basically won't get a chance to use in future, but still
> need to keep there at least for the next two years just in case.
> 
> so I tried the xz, but xz not support the directory? or maybe I don't
> know how to compress the directory.

This may help:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/28976/how-to-xz-a-directory-with-tar-using-maximum-compression
 
> now tried the .bz2, but still very large.

For my usual data backup I use tar and bz2 though I don't expect to compress 
too much but I need the best interop and compatibility.

Anyway, what kind of data is that heap of 2 TiB?

Multimedia binary files (image, video, audio...) use their own 
compression algorithms so you are not going to get any noticeable gain 
when compressing these kind of files.

For general purpose data compression, Wikipedia has a good list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers

And also some info on benchmarks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression_benchmarks#Lossless_compression_benchmarks

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón