Hi,
I have a huge folder of size 26.5GB. I would like to compress it using the highest compression possible and take a backup somewhere. The folder has only avi files in it. I used bz2 and created a tar archive using the command: tar -cvjf foo.tar.gz foo
However, after it ran all night, I checked the size of the tar arhive and it was around 26.2GB. Not as much compression as I expected. I did some digging and found out that 7zip is capable of higher compression than bz2. So I installed p7zip and tried to find a command to use it with tar. But I came up empty. So could someone please give me the command to use tar with 7zip with the highest compression possible?

Oh another thing, based on my system stats (you can find it in my signature) do you think I would run into some trouble if I use the highest compression in terms of memory requirement?

Thanks.

I don't really see the point why you want to compress avi with 7zip.

Video files are usually compressed by various video and audio codecs. So you won't gain much further compression.

Also the compression compared to the invested system resources doesn't stand in a good ratio.

I would recommend to store the data uncompressed. A difference of a few 100 MB compared to gigabytes of data does not make any sense if you don't want ot store the data on dvd or cd media where size really matters.

Hey,
Thanks. I didnt really think of it that way. I suppose its best to burn them on DVD. The thing is, when Kubuntu Hardy Heron comes out, I would like to do a clean install including formatting my /home. So I need to backup all the stuff now.

Thanks.