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posted by martyb on Thursday September 12 2019, @07:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-depends dept.

Web developer Ukiah Smith wrote a blog post about which compression format to use when archiving. Obviously the algorithm must be lossless but beyond that he sets some criteria and then evaluates how some of the more common methods line up.

After some brainstorming I have arrived with a set of criteria that I believe will help ensure my data is safe while using compression.

  • The compression tool must be opensource.
  • The compression format must be open.
  • The tool must be popular enough to be supported by the community.
  • Ideally there would be multiple implementations.
  • The format must be resilient to data loss.

Some formats I am looking at are zip, 7zip, rar, xz, bzip2, tar.

He closes by mentioning error correction. That has become more important than most acknowledge due to the large size of data files, the density of storage, and the propensity for bits to flip.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Friday September 13 2019, @01:54AM (6 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday September 13 2019, @01:54AM (#893472) Journal
    At some point you realize that stuff that's gone isn't the end of the world. Pictures? I've got my memories, and that's better. And if I ever get senile, pictures won't help, and my advanced medical directive kicks in and I die, so I'm not gonna worry about it.

    Their there were a fire, my priorities would be my identity papers and cards, some clothes, and my dogs. Everything else, including my data, is secondary. If I lost my movie and mp3 collection tomorrow, I would not sweat it. Same with my laptop and all my data backups. I guess my perspective has changed as I got old(er). Except not really, my list of things that were important hasn't changed in 25 years - dogs, I'd paperwork, some clothes on my back. Just not the same dogs (they get old, they get sick, but I stay with them to the end and I remember each one, don't need pictures).

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday September 13 2019, @03:25AM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Friday September 13 2019, @03:25AM (#893509)

    Interesting you say those things, because other than the dogs, those are pretty replaceable. Hopefully your dogs would be the ones saving you if there was a fire.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @01:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @01:33PM (#893622)

    You're conflating "end of the world" and "good/want to have".

    Surely, it's not the end of the world if gone, yet many people want pics, emails, and do read some of them, even if you do not.

    And.. parent poster seems to be concerned, which may indicate historical annoyance at having something gone MIA. So, it's not about 'end of the world', but 'I can do this, I want to do this, so why on Earth not do it correctly, and well'.

    As far as I'm concerned, most people take 1 hour to do a 2 hour task, but then the 1 hour task ends up fruitless, as it was not done correctly. Do it right, or don't bother...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:10PM (#893641)

    Human memory is unreliable even if old age is somewhere far away in the future, though.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 16 2019, @01:36AM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday September 16 2019, @01:36AM (#894489)

    Sure - precious little is the end of the world. You can lose everything you own, your livelihood, every person who loves you, and even your health and limbs, and the sun still comes up tomorrow. The human animal is an amazingly resilient beast - any trauma that doesn't break you will be just a memory before long.

    But you just never know what you're going to one day wish you had. Source code for a project you never expected to care about again, that would save you weeks of effort on something you're working on today. A memento of an occasion that seemed relatively minor at the time, but became far more significant in well-seasoned retrospect.

    I've purged several times, both digitally and physically, and have eventually regretted it every time. I still do it physically, because I just don't have room for all that junk - and as you say, memories are far more important than any memento anyway. But digital stuff doesn't take hardly any spce. Sure, I lose my movie collection no big deal - easily replaced if it matters enough to bother. My mp3 collection would be a bigger deal - I've taken decades rafting it to my tastes to provide a variety of different ambiances conductive to different endeavors. My documents... most I would probably never miss, but I know first hand that I'll never guess the ones I truly will. And so long as I have a I have a movie collection, the documents, mp3s, photos, etc. take up such a tiny amount of space in comparison that keeping them "just in case" is essentially free. It's not even a shoebox of old photos to lug around - just one tiny corner of a hard drive that's exactly the same size and weight either way.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 16 2019, @05:30PM (1 child)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday September 16 2019, @05:30PM (#894705) Journal
      To each their own, but every time I've recreated source code that I had written and not kept, the rewrite has been better. Two reasons.

      1 More experience

      2 The nature of the problem at hand has changed, or the computing environment (from dos to Windows to*nix, from 16 to 32 to 64 bit, from monochrome to change to vga to true colour).

      Old code might never die, but it can become obsolete.

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      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 17 2019, @03:12PM

        by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday September 17 2019, @03:12PM (#895172)

        Oh absolutely.

        However, I've encountered numerous situations where recreating the source code isn't actually worth the time and effort required, so I make something "good enough" to do what I need, and just do without all the "nice to have" features I would have gotten for free if the old code was still around.