Dump + GZIP

Federico Lorenzi florenzi at gmail.com
Thu Aug 16 07:20:34 PDT 2007


On 8/16/07, John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:
> 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.

Try give LZMA a shot. The last time I checked, it was a lot faster then bzip2
at decompression and made smaller files too. For speed however, gzip would
be the best choice.

Federico


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