yes, but it's a lot slower too. both gzip and bzip2 take arguments -1 through -9. -1 being fastest and -9 being slowest.

/usr# time tar clfj - share > share.tar.bz2; ls -l share.tar.bz2
real 3m23.895s
user 3m12.188s
sys 0m2.826s
97260 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 99594240 Aug 27 04:38 share.tar.bz2

/usr# time tar clfz - share > share.tar.gz; ls -l share.tar.gz
real 0m27.745s
user 0m24.088s
sys 0m2.908s
102772 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 105236480 Aug 27 04:40 share.tar.gz

usually bzip2 makes more of a difference than it did there.

Not necessarily; I rode a ski lift once that conveyed me uphill in a way far more terrifying than anything Linux has thrown my way yet. (I have a great fear of heights.)

That is a big difference. I, too had read that bzip2 was more reliable but also slower; had never seen an actual comparison before of the time involved.

I like often to turn my machine off at night (it's not a server), so I do like to be able to backup during actual use--but a lot of files if in use at the moment by an application either don't get copied correctly, or else they don't get copied at all. So that's a consideration...

I've been seeking the best backup routine for almost two years now and I'm still about where I started.

i like dar. it has a lot of the features of dump, but works on different filesystems. you can do full backup or just backup files that changed since the last backup.

and i meant that bzip2 usually makes a bigger file size difference than above.

Thanks -- I'll take another look at dar. Quite a while ago I downloaded it, don't remember why I didn't put it into service; possibly I couldn't get it installed due to dependency problems. Will re-investigate.