Dear all.
Today I was backing up my windows data using the program called toucan (free-portable program).
For the backup process I had three options
zip
7-zip
gzip compression.
I have heard for my windows friends that sometimes zip files lose tree structure whatever that means. Thus I have selected the gzip compression. Even though the gzip runs in a windows host, have you ever heard that gzip has any kind of problems with big tree structures or big files?
Did you ever had any problems with your compressed files in linux (in terms of recovering them back?)
As far as I know, gzip is just a compression algorithm for single files or streams of data. It doesn’t know anything about tree structures. Presumably, the software is using something else to map the tree structure into a linear stream of data.
In my experience, gzip has been quite reliable, including for big files.
ZIP is not an option for me because of its limitations regarding file
size. Working with files in the 2+ GB range is not possible with the main
ZIP standard, though tools like pkzip and winzip have come up with their
own, non-interoperable and non-standard, ways of doing it (so a pkzip file
where a 2+ GB file is zipped is not going to be interoperable with winzip,
and vice versa). gzip is a stream editor and so will compress things as
long as there is a stream and I doubt it has a limit. tar is used for
bundling multiple files together into one stream for gzip (or bzip2, or
whatever else) and I haven’t seen it care about sizes or tree structures
either. As Jim mentions, corruption can happen anywhere but it should be
detected… not just lost and then glossed over.
Good luck.
On 04/04/2011 03:36 PM, alaios wrote:
>
> Dear all.
> Today I was backing up my windows data using the program called toucan
> (free-portable program).
> For the backup process I had three options
>
> zip
> 7-zip
> gzip compression.
>
> I have heard for my windows friends that sometimes zip files lose tree
> structure whatever that means. Thus I have selected the gzip
> compression. Even though the gzip runs in a windows host, have you ever
> heard that gzip has any kind of problems with big tree structures or big
> files?
>
> Did you ever had any problems with your compressed files in linux (in
> terms of recovering them back?)
>
> Regards
> Alex
>
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.15 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
