[mdlug] Compression and Archiving

[Drew]

At 07:03 AM 1/12/10, Robert Citek wrote:
>Can you describe a couple of use-case scenarios?  That is, under what
>conditions do you see yourself retrieving the data and for what
>purpose?  For example, do you see yourself in a year or more from now
>searching through DVDs to find the one PDF you are looking for?

They are a bunch of books - enough to stock a small city library - 
sorted into directories
according to category. So yes, I  would  be often loading a labeled 
DVD in (and loop
mounting the big file on it if applicable) to read a particular book, 
or peruse the selection.

I do have, or will have, as soon as I'm sure everything has been 
moved from it or is not
needed, a spare 160 GB drive. (The old main system drive.) I could 
use that for regular
service, until I can afford Terabyte-size drives.

And I may not need as much space as I thought. I have been finding 
instances of duplication,
triplication, and quadruplication of content, including directories 
named after author Firstname
Lastname, and same author Lastname Firstname with mostly the same 
titles, and the same title
in multiple formats (pdf, txt, and html). I'm not sure just how much 
space is accounted for by this
duplication, but some of it at least can be recovered.

I have more cleaning up to do on it. The creator of this collection 
committed the cardinal
sin of using whitespace characters in all the file and directory 
names. I've written a script to
correct this, but I'll still be a while fixing things.

As for tape, I remember having recovery problems when I relied on it 
for backups, which drove me
to magneto-optical media, and then to CDR when it became affordable.

----

- Drew.