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Which Compression Format to Use for Archiving?

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

canopic jug writes:

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: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 13 2019, @05:58AM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday September 13 2019, @05:58AM (#893546) Journal

    Disagree. HTML is totally overkill for simple writing. Markdown is absolutely sufficient for most writing tasks.

    On the other hand, if you do need advanced features, HTML is too limited. Use LaTeX in that case.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @02:14PM (#893644)

    LaTeX is too complex and more or less code. Plain text is where it is. Borrow simplest formatting (bold/italic/headings) from Markdown and call it a day.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 13 2019, @02:16PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday September 13 2019, @02:16PM (#893647) Homepage Journal

    My personal preference would be for all things TeX to die in a fire. It's almost, but not quite, as enjoyable as the PDF format. I'll stick with HTML and do anything especially funky in an image file.

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