My HDD is 99.5% full so I want to compress a stack of movie clips. When I try to compress the directory;

$gzip -r directoryName

It fails as I am told there is no space left on the HDD. I thought I was shrinking stuff not adding data to the HDD. How can I free up space on my HDD by compressing files with so little space left?

Dear Une:

You cannot do that. Because, when the % space is just 0.5, where will the computer store the compressed files? I do not think that you can achieve on-the-fly compression. Has anybody yet done that? Even on Windows, just to defragment a drive, it asks for atleast 15% of free space. This is just an example.

Actually when you gzip a file, gzipped data are added to the compressed file while reading from the original one: only when the process has finished, the original uncompressed copy is removed. Therefore, when you run gzip the disk must have room for the original file plus the compressed one (suppose you have a file size of 500 Mb and the compression rate is only 10%: gzip requires 450 Mb of free space to create the compressed copy).

Usually movie clips have a low compression rate, since most of them are already in a compressed format. So you can try to gzip the smaller ones to make room for the compression of the bigger ones.

Compressing movie and audio clips with generic compression programs and algorithms is pointless (due to their random nature), it'll hardly get you 1% compression ratio. The only way to compress audio and video is using specialized compression algorithms and containers, however, take note that all such compression algorithms are rather lossy (you lose quality). It depends on what is your acceptable level for how crappy the video and audio can be.

Just back it all up to a stack of DVDs or something.

Thanks. Burning to DVD was an option before k3b died. I keep getting an error that appears repeatedly and endlessly that goes something like "Make sure DCOP server is working". I am not at home now and can't recall the error wording precisely. I thought I would compress some stuff to buy me some time. It seems I have to face the music with k3b now and fix it. In fact this may be the prompt I need to ditch Mandrake 10 (which has slowly fallen apart over the last year or so and is now riddled with problems), slot a new HDD into a bay and install the latest Ubuntu distro.

You can burn a DVD successfully from the command line if you want. You can try bashburn or the like.

For backing up files you can do this (as root):

You can change the speed to whatever you wanna burn at, 1x, 4x, etc. Don't burn too fast tho, it may result in a coaster for you beer or soda And of course the '/home/bob/myfiles' should be replaced by the path to your files you wanna backup.

Thanks a lot, I will give it a go.

Are you running gnome rather than kde. You may be missing some kde libraries. DCOP is a KDE feature for communicating or controlling a kde application, such as one program calling another, or controlling a kde program from a script.