A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

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Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How do I compress my backups?

Well, you could just run the output of tar, cpio, or whatever through compress but if even one bit of your tape or diskette goes bad, you could lose the rest of the backup. Not recommended at all, unless of course you don't actually care if your backups work - but if you didn't care, you wouldn't be doing any, right?

Linux and other more modern versions of tar include a compress flag, but it's no different than compressing the archive itself: individual files are not compressed, just the whole archive.

A better solution would be a third-party product. The next answer lists a few ... if you produce, market, or use one that's not listed below but which you feel should be, please send me the information.

But do you even need to do this? Your tape drive probably does hardware compression anyway, so this may be unimportant. You still should ook at better backup than tar or cpio though.

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