Compressing Backups

Once upon a time CPU power was low. In those days, what we have today, was termed to be Super Computers.

Thanks to tough competition and great engineering, we now have CPU in the range of Gigahertz and multiple cores. But on Destkops/Laptops, do we really have applications that utilize the ability of these processors ?

So I thought about making these powerful CPUs to do some work.

There are different views about Backups. My preference has always been that my backup should be an identical image of my entire OS. That’d include the cache, the packages installed, my personal data, my mail spool et cetera. Given the requirements, my preferred choice of Backups has been LVM Snapshots.

And now to add to that is this

rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso | bzip2 -v /tmp/bzip.test

(stdin): 965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 291.708 s, 1.7 MB/s
1.058:1, 7.559 bits/byte, 5.51% saved, 494178304 in, 466933711 out.
rrs@champaran:$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.test
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
446M /tmp/bzip.test
rrs@champaran:$ dd if=/tmp/bzip.test | bunzip2 -dc | dd of=/tmp/bzip.uncompress
911979+1 records in
911979+1 records out
466933711 bytes (467 MB) copied, 135.861 s, 3.4 MB/s
965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 136.115 s, 3.6 MB/s
rrs@champaran:$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.uncompress
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
472M /tmp/bzip.uncompress
rrs@champaran:$ md5sum
md5sum md5sum.textutils
rrs@champaran:$ md5sum debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
rrs@champaran:$ md5sum /tmp/bzip.uncompress
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 /tmp/bzip.uncompress

Now, the thing I need to verify is is wether D-I ships bzip2 utils on the CD.

See also