For several reasons I would like to do a backup from a Windows XP
machine to a Linux box using tar. The GnuWin32 tar works fine, however,
without the -z option which compresses files with gzip. Does anybody
have experience and hints with that?

- Wilfried

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

In article <2n7d8mFtc6dcU1@uni-berlin.de>, newsgroup-
only@news.com says...
> For several reasons I would like to do a backup from a Windows XP
> machine to a Linux box using tar. The GnuWin32 tar works fine, however,
> without the -z option which compresses files with gzip. Does anybody
> have experience and hints with that?

I've piped the output of tar through bzip2 before.
Don't know that there's an advantage of doing it that
way or not.

tar -cv * | bzip2 -9 > file.tar.bz2

Speeds (AthlonXP 2600+, PC2700 DDR333)
2.85GB (10:53 to 11:41, 48min, 60.8 MB/min)
2.17GB (10:34 to 11:09, 35min, 63.5 MB/min)
8.49GB (11:12 to 13:30, 138min, 63.0 MB/min)
7.80GB (2:20 to 5:13, 173min, 46 MB/min, lots of small
files)
4.42GB (3:15 to 4:28, 73min, 62 MB/min)
0.85GB (8:55 to 9:09, 14min, 62 MB/min)
1.06GB (9:15 to 9:34,. 19min, 57 MB/min)

Another alternative for you is to do an rsync instead
from the WinXP box to the linux box.  That requires
either running rsync in daemon mode on the linux box or
use ssh+rsync.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Thank you very  much for your hint. Piping is working great.

One interesting experiment: 
For test purposes I used my download directory with all kinds of files, some
 already compressed, some plain.
Here are the resusults:

Option:         tar-file size        time
plain tar        232 120 320       2:09 min
tar+gzip         213 719 020       1:28 min
tar+bzip2 -9     214 218 791       6:27 min

Seems that bzip2 is very slow and in this case even compressing less than gz
ip.

ONE ADDITIONAL QUESTION:

Do you know a method to tar (write) directly to a tape on the Linux machine?
. So far I'm using Samba to write the tar file on the Linux machine. This, h
owever, works for writing to disk only.

- Wilfried

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004 14:27:55 +0200, "Wilfried Kern"
<newsgroup-only@news.com> wrote:

>Thank you very  much for your hint. Piping is working great.
>
>One interesting experiment:
>For test purposes I used my download directory with all kinds of files, som
e already compressed, some plain.
>Here are the resusults:
>
>Option:         tar-file size        time
>plain tar        232 120 320       2:09 min
>tar+gzip         213 719 020       1:28 min
>tar+bzip2 -9     214 218 791       6:27 min
>
>Seems that bzip2 is very slow and in this case even compressing less than g
zip.
>
>ONE ADDITIONAL QUESTION:
>
>Do you know a method to tar (write) directly to a tape on the Linux machine
?. So far I'm using Samba to write the tar file on the Linux machine. This, 
however, works for writing to disk only.
>

You can use the device definition for your tape drive as the
destination for your tar command.  See man tar.

Hal

>- Wilfried

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

In article <2nc32sFv9pk2U1@uni-berlin.de>, newsgroup-
only@news.com says...
> Thank you very  much for your hint. Piping is working great.
>
> One interesting experiment:
> For test purposes I used my download directory with all kinds of files, so
me already compressed, some plain.
> Here are the resusults:
>
> Option:         tar-file size        time
> plain tar        232 120 320       2:09 min
> tar+gzip         213 719 020       1:28 min
> tar+bzip2 -9     214 218 791       6:27 min
>
> Seems that bzip2 is very slow and in this case even compressing less than 
gzip.
>

I was using bzip2 more because it seems like all of the
open source packages seem to be using for packaging.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]