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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:55AM
Everything you say is fine. RIght up until you lose a bit of that 7z file. You want something like par2 in the mix too. The downside is it uses up quite a decent amount of extra space on top of your archive file. Extra backups, plus raid, plus some extra encode metadata ontop should get you pretty much there. Plus offsite backups of all of it including the recovery data.