Frank Cox wrote: > On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:29:52 -0400 > Robert Heller wrote: > >> Note that is also possible to use dump or cpio as well. Unlike the >> MS-Windows zip/unzip, which combines compressing and archiving in a >> single program, the 'UNIX' way is to separate these functions. bzip2 >> only compresses. Other programs (tar, dump, cpio) create archives -- >> bundle a group of files and/or directory trees into a single file. > > Depending on your needs, you can obtain better compression with programs > other > than bzip2. The price paid for the additional compression can be processing > time, ram requirements, robustness, compatibility and several or none of the > above. pbzip2 is available too if you have more than 1 cpu core: http://compression.ca/pbzip2/ Though I prefer pigz(parallel gzip), both pbzip2 and pigz are completely compatible with regular bzip2 and gzip. http://www.zlib.net/pigz/ bzip2 is reallly slow, but if you happen to have a 8 core or better system you can get some pretty good speed out of pbzip2, though in both cases the parallellness is only available on compression not on decompression(last I checked). I've been using pigz on a daily basis to backup databases for more than a year now, I always run gzip -t afterward as part of the backup script and so far have never had an error. nate