Backups using compress

[wd]

In <14582 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>                       ...What most people do is to compress the archive,
>not the individual files; that also should generally be more compact.
>In this method you can simply pipe the archive through "compress".

*** WARNING ***
If you ever want to be able to restore the files then *DO NEVER EVER
compress archive files! Any I/O error will cause you to lose all
your files after the error because you can *BY NO WAY* re-synchronize
in a compressed archive file.

It would be a nice feature if tar or cpio could compress individual
files, but the archive headers *MUST NOT* be compressed. Otherwise
you could archive your date to a WOM-device (Write Only Memory) -
this saves o lot of time! :-) :-)

*** YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED ***

Wolfgang

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