Compression tools Compared

[Jerry McBride]

Anyone else here subscribe to the LINUX JOURNAL?

In the September issue there's a neat article titled tha same as the subject 
line of this message.

The skinny is, there's some really nice file compressors out there and I never 
heard of two of them... Anyone else know about LZMA or 7ZA?

The two mentioned compression tools work pretty much like gzip. You tar up 
your files, pipe to the compression filter and then on to the target file. 
Below is a small example of what I've been seeing here at the shack.

-rw-r--r--  1 root root 12359680 Aug 12 23:57 backup.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  3536665 Aug 13 00:01 backup.tar.7z
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  4438465 Aug 13 00:08 backup.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  4747637 Aug 13 00:03 backup.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  2731412 Aug 13 00:10 backup.tar.lzma
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  5125474 Aug 13 00:16 backup.tar.lzop

What you're seeing are the results of compressing /lib on my gentoo powered 
laptop. I've not bothered with timing the processes as the better compression 
rates are at the cost of speed and memory usage. Not good for "while you 
wait" processing, but just plain perfect for backups and what-have-you on 
servers... One side note, 7za does not record user/group info... It's a shame 
too as this make it pretty much useless in most linux backup scenarios. This 
lzma creature is simply awesome.

You can find it at: http://martinus.geekisp.com/rublog.cgi/Projects/LZMA

Cheers all....

-- 

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