Speed ain't bad

[Reinhold Birkenfeld]

Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 11:17, Jeremy Bowers wrote:
> 
>> I would point out a couple of other ideas, though you may be aware of
>> them: Compressing all the files seperately, if they are small, may greatly
>> reduce the final compression since similarities between the files can not
>> be exploited.
> 
> True; however, it's my understanding that compressing individual files
> also means that in the case of damage to the archive it is possible to
> recover the files after the damaged file. This cannot be guaranteed when
> the archive is compressed as a single stream.

With gzip, you can forget the entire rest of the stream; with bzip2,
there is a good chance that nothing more than one block (100-900k) is lost.

regards,
Reinhold