On Wed, 2020-03-25 at 14:39 +0000, Leroy Tennison wrote:
Since you state that using -z is almost always a bad idea, could you provide the rationale for that? I must be missing something.
I think the "rationale" is that at some point the compression/decompression takes longer than the time reduction from sending a compressed file. It depends on the relative speeds of the machines and the network.
You have most to gain from compressing large files, but if they are already compressed, then you have nothing to gain from just doing small files.
It obviously depends on your network speed and if you have a metered connection, but does anyone really have such an ancient network connection still these days - I mean if you have fast enough machines at both ends to do rapid compression/decompression, it seems unlikely that you will have a damp piece of string connecting them.
I really don't understand the discussion here. What is wrong with using -z with rsync? We're using rsync with -z for backups and just don't want to waste bandwidth for nothing. We have better use for our bandwidth and it makes quite a difference when backing up terabytes of data.
The only reason why I asked for help is because we don't want to double compress data which is already compressed. This is what currently is broken in rsync without manually specifying a skip-compress list. Fixing it would help all those who don't know it's broken now.
Thanks, Simon