On Tuesday 31 December 2002 12:56 pm, Harry G wrote:
I have a Documents directory that is 53.2 MB in size. Using ark, I backed it up to another hard drive as a tar file. The tar file is 53.5 MB.
I thought that the file would be smaller in size. What am I missing here?
as others have mentioned, "vanilla" tar files are not compressed; under (gnu) linux, tar files with extensions of .tgz or .tar.gz represent tar files that are compressed [after being built] with gzip/gunzip. These will be the most common, though the "B" zip/unzip programs provide more compression
If it becomes larger, I could just do a cp command, and save space! Is it ark that is the problem?
but wait, there's more! What sort of documents are you archiving? If you happen to be archiving "openoffice.org" documents [also known as star office] then using compression may indeed "expand" the files -- OO/So 6 files are already compressed [dump the first part of a file w/more or less and you'll see the "magic" field that indicates compression] decompress the "document" and you'll find it is an XML file (but I digress) Files compressed once don't re-compress very well, and usually expand -- I just have to shake my head when I download a big file and decompress it to find all it contained was another compressed file/archive [like someone compressing a .zip file into a .tar/.tgz file, for instance]