On Jan 30, 2008 10:51 AM, Marko A. Jennings <markobiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, January 30, 2008 1:36 pm, MHR wrote:
> <snip>
> > As long as the majority of the files are not plain text - I have had
> > really bad results using bzip2 on text files - specifically, massive
> > file corruption. I have had to go back to pre-bzipped archives to
> > rebuild these files - not a fun task.
>
> Why do you think that the corruption you experienced had something to do
> with bzip2? I have been using it on a regular basis for the last several
> years to compress files of all sizes (ranging from very small to several
> gigabytes) and have yet to experience any corruption whatsoever.
>
One of my hobbies is writing, a practice in which I have been engaged
since the late 1980s. For personal reasons, until very recently, I
did all of my writing in plain text files, all around 20-30k, and kept
all my archives in pkzip, then zip/unzip format. From August through
December, 1999, I was using bzip2 instead because it got slightly
better compression. Some time in January, 2000, I found that some of
the files I had not changed in a long time, and some that I had just
edited, had become corrupted and I had to rebuild them.
Maybe bzip2 has improved since then, but my experience with it has
been jaded ever since, and I'd rather go for reliability over a slight
improvement in compression any day.
I may undertake an experiment and keep parallel bzip2 archives for a
while, but now isn't a good time for it.
On the other hand, I've been using bzip2 for a few executables since
that same time frame and, AFAIK, they work just fine, no corruption.
As I said, YMMV, and that's just my $0.02.
mhr
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