[mdlug] Compression and Archiving

[Aaron Kulkis]

Drew wrote:
> 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.
> 

a 500 GB 2.5" drive in a USB carrier is about $100 these days.