On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 11:39:11AM -0400, Todd Vierling wrote:
> Of course, stream compression assumes zero corruption on the tape, which
> becomes more probable as the tape dump gets larger.  Once a corrupted
> block is hit, the rest of the dump is unusable (or at least, a pretty
> huge chunk; things like bzip2recover can reset the decompression every
> once in a while in the data stream).

It should be an option, so people can consider the risc and decide for
themselves.  It would mostly be used for backup to cd etc, not to tape, I
guess (since many tape drives use hardware compression already).  

Another application would be to pipe the dump through gnupg (or bpg when
it's ready).  I don't know how corruption-proof that is.  Again, some
people may find encryption of their data important enough to take the risc.  

GH