| I have 12 files (dd images of partitions) which I'm bzip2-ing to save on some space. I started this with bzip2 imagefile, and it just occured to me, that I could have used tar -cjf to get them all in one go instead. Now, I'm not about to redo anything, I bzip2-ed those files individually and that's good enough for now, but for future reference: as I understand it, tar does little more than collate all the files together and then run the whole chunk through bzip2, so is there a way to consistently predict the best compression ratio? Does tar always get the best ratio, do individiual bzip2's, or is it one of those things where you'd have to try each and every time to know? |
