On Jan 30, 2008 10:51 AM, Marko A. Jennings markobiz@bluegargoyle.com wrote:
On Wed, January 30, 2008 1:36 pm, MHR wrote:
<snip> > As long as the majority of the files are not plain text - I have had > really bad results using bzip2 on text files - specifically, massive > file corruption. I have had to go back to pre-bzipped archives to > rebuild these files - not a fun task.
Why do you think that the corruption you experienced had something to do with bzip2? I have been using it on a regular basis for the last several years to compress files of all sizes (ranging from very small to several gigabytes) and have yet to experience any corruption whatsoever.
One of my hobbies is writing, a practice in which I have been engaged since the late 1980s. For personal reasons, until very recently, I did all of my writing in plain text files, all around 20-30k, and kept all my archives in pkzip, then zip/unzip format. From August through December, 1999, I was using bzip2 instead because it got slightly better compression. Some time in January, 2000, I found that some of the files I had not changed in a long time, and some that I had just edited, had become corrupted and I had to rebuild them.
Maybe bzip2 has improved since then, but my experience with it has been jaded ever since, and I'd rather go for reliability over a slight improvement in compression any day.
I may undertake an experiment and keep parallel bzip2 archives for a while, but now isn't a good time for it.
On the other hand, I've been using bzip2 for a few executables since that same time frame and, AFAIK, they work just fine, no corruption.
As I said, YMMV, and that's just my $0.02.
mhr