Re: Windows "client", and already-compressed files

[On 25 Jan, @ 18:20, James wrote in "[hdup-user] Windows "client",  ..."]
> I'm not skilled enough in C software develement on Windows platform to
> take this on, so I wonder if anyone's been able to port HDUP to
> Windows before and make it work with SSH to back up a Windows box to a
> remote server.

although I hate windows :), I'm willing to invest some time in this,
provided that someone can point out to me that gnu tar and openssh
already run on windows. Otherwise it would be an effort in futility.

[some further remarks: it should be possible to port hdup2 to windows,
but I lack a windows compiler and a developer platform. I only use it
for games :)]

> 2nd - a much easier question. I've switched to bz2 for compression
> lately to save space. It's a lot slower than gzip. My poor Athlon 950
> backup server takes several hours to do a full backup (~7 gig
> uncompressed) of my windows workstation.

Someone said on this list that lzop has better compression than gzip
and is quicker than bzip2, so that is what I used for the backups 
of my firewall. (I removed this machine from my network setup, to make 
my computer room more quiet :))

> Does HDUP try to compress files that are already compressed, or not

The compressed files are added to the tar archive and compressed. So
the answer is: yes.

> really compressible, e.g. .zip, .gz, .jpeg, .mp3, .wav? Is there any
> way to configure this? An option like "exclude", except "called
> "no-compress" or something that would let you specify pattens to NOT
> compress, would be very handy for speeding things up. Since I make ZIP
> archives of things that I use less often anyway, there's no reason for
> HDUP to waste time trying to recompress it.

great idea... but I see only problems in implementing it... as hdup
only "delivers" files to gnu tar, this should be handled in tar with
some option. But this can only work if the compression happens "on the
fly". If tar first creates an archives _and_ _then_ compresses it,
this is all useless, I guess.

But then again, if you need to zip things, you might need a bigger
harddisk :)

--
grtz,
  - Miek

http://www.miek.nl                   http://www.nlnetlabs.nl