On Jan 30, 2008 10:51 AM, Marko A. Jennings <markobiz at 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