Best compression method?

[sitheris]

I have about 100gb of media I'd like to archive and compress.

I am wondering what the best compression method is to make the smallest filesize.

From what I've read, I would need to first create a TAR of the entire directory structure in my media folder. Then apply some sort of compression.

Most programs I download typically use either gunzip or bunzip compression

Is one better than the other or is there a better 3rd party tool I could use?

Thanks

 

[unhappy_mage]

bzip2 is marginally better. GRzip is marginally better again, but it doesn't integrate with tar like bzip2 does, so it'd be more of a pain to deal with.

tar jcvf it is.

 

[eeyrjmr]

it all depends.

You are right in say TAR creates a single file (uncompressed) and then some compression algorithm is applied (either gzip or bzip2 or...)

The problem is when you say "media"

If by that you mean mp3 or mpeg then no amount of compression will make it (much ) smaller, that is because the source is already compressed (the same is true if you try to zip a load of jpg [to some extent])

bzip2 is fantatic on ASCII files, I do not know how it fairs on binary, or more to the point already compressed data.

try RAR that will probably give you the best result (as well as being able to imbed a recovery record)

 

[sitheris]

Well I say media because there's a lot of it in this directory but I also have lots of other things too that I keep around like ISOs of various Linux distros, and also a few VMs (not sure how well VMs compress)