Dump + GZIP

[John Nielsen]

On Thursday 16 August 2007, Grant Peel wrote:
> Can I safely pump a filesystem dump through gzip during the dumping
> process?, or di I need to create the dump first then gzip it after?

I do it all the time: dump -f - ... | gzip > date_filesystem.dump.gz
or with bzip2: dump -f - ... | bzip2 > date_filesystem.dump.bz2

> Does zipping the dumps cause any headaches at restore time?

Nope: bzcat date_filesystem.dump.bz2 | restore ... -f -

> (I currently dump 5 servers worth of data to a raid 5 array, and am about
> 20% away from running out of disk space).
>
> Does gzipping a file give a decent compression ratio?

Depends on what you're compressing, but generally yes. bzip2 generally 
compresses better but takes a lot more time, CPU and memory at compression 
time.

JN