Re: Archiving


Thanks to all for the informative responses.

Please elaborate: what do _you_ mean with reliability? How do you
expect commercial and non-commercial software to differ?

I work with commercial software routinely, and I'm often surprised at
how many people view Unix as some antiquated, useless form of
technology. I discovered BSD about 10 years ago and I've yet to find
any task (with maybe the exception of audio/video edit and mix
operations) which doesn't perform better on this platform. I also
despise the one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter "improvements" that
continually pour out of new releases of popular commercial products.
Thank you very much, but I'd like to choose which letters get
capitalized in my sentences. So I guess my expectations are pretty
high with tools such as tar and gzip. I've done a lot more unpacking
than packing up though, and before I institute some kind of automatic
data backup process at home, I'm trying to get more familiar with the
available tools.

So you'll need to spell out more clearly what you mean with `keep better'.

I didn't know if data which *wasn't* archived and compressed had a
higher susceptibility to data corruption. Maybe this sounds like a
silly question, since one might generally assume that corruption would
more likely be introduced by a process rather than no process at all.
But I wondered about this because often I receive things (PDFs, DAT
files, images, etc.) compressed when there is very little size
difference between the compressed version and the original. But I
take it that the answer is "no", and again I appreciate the responses.

.