shrinking backup files

[Pete Hunt]

Jesper Krogh wrote:
> I gmane.linux.ubuntu.user, skrev Charles Malespin:
> 
>> Hi all, I recently did a tar cpf etc.tar /etc and tar cpf
>> home.tar /home/usrname to make backups.  The .tar file I got for /home
>> is huge, 8Gb, 
<snip>
>  create it with
> 
>  tar czvf /path/to/file tar-archive.tar.gz 
> 
>  or
> 
>  tar cjvf /path/to/file tar-archive.tar.bz2

You may also want to avoid sticking everything in one big tarball. It 
takes a fair amount of processing time to compress / uncompress Gigs of 
data and there's also the risk that if the backup is dodgy, all the data 
is useless.

I use smaller files (say 100MB per gzipped tarball) so that if one does 
get become corrupted I don't lose the whole backup.  Of course, this 
uses a bit more space and ymmv.

Pete