[mdlug] Compression and Archiving

[Drew]

I find myself with a lot of data to archive and back up - 120 GB of 
it, with possibly more to come at a
later date - and am considering DVDs and squashfs. Current DVD cost 
weighs in at 18 cents a disk
(Office Max), which is under 4 cents a gigabyte, which is less than 
half the cost of current terabyte
range hard drives as far as I know.

Still, before committing resources to this I thought it a good idea 
to consult the list on a couple of things.

Squashfs seems to give me compression down to from 66% to 77% of 
original size with most of the
files being PDFs. I had been hoping for something a bit better. Is 
there a way to specify better compression
methods? Is there a better filesystem to use? Or would I be better 
off using something like gzip or bz2?
I'd like to be able to mount these as loop devices.

Also, can an entire DVD be a squashfs filesystem? Or does it have to 
be wrapped in an iso?

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- Drew.