@shaf
Although tar (short for tape archiver) is the dstandard in the Unix world, it has terrible compression.
tar has no compression. It can gzip the tar file, or call external (de)compress command for it, however.
sometimes tarred file will be bigger than the original file.
My suggestion is if using tar to compress the files first before writing to tape.
No no no. You tar (group) files first, then compress the resulting data. This will always yield better compression ratio than compressing single files.
To gzip the tar file automagically use 'z' flag with tar.
I usually zip up the files first and then tar them.
The final archive ais referred to as a tarball
Eeeeeh, no. That's totally braindead, and the wrong way around. If you *really* want to use zip, you need to tar first, then zip the resulting tar file.
I recommend bzip2:n the tar though, or using 'j' option with recent tar. If your tar has no 'j' option use, '--use-compress-program bzip2'.
