I want to keep the original files I'm going to compress.  Looking through the man file it looks as if I should use the option '--backup'. Unfortunately I can't really decipher the manpage correctly. Is backup the correct option, is there another I should use, or should I just copy the directories I want to archive? This reminds me of another question I have: when I append these files from the top level directory will it append the files under it as well?

On Wed, Nov 30, er at 5:28 PM, Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:
are the options 'op'uld A' and 'r' in 'tar' the same thing?
'm

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:
From: Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com>
> I want to compress a bunch [of] pictures to put a bunch on my zip
> drive. What is the best program to use?

Most image formats are already compressed in some way.  JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and
PNG are almost always compressed.  Compressing an already-compressed data set
doesn't usually buy you very much at all, 1 or 2% if that.

> I was thinking 'zip' would be good

See above.  zip will work, though tar combined with bzip2 (or xz/lzma) may be
more space-efficient at the cost of it taking longer to compress and
uncompress the data.  That's "tar cjf images.tar.bz2 images/" or "tar cJf
images.tar.xz images/" to create compressed tarballs of everything in the
images/ dir.  Replace "tar cjf" with "tar xjf" to uncompress.

--
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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