A quick look at compression formats
Saturday, September 5th, 2009gzip is a blance of speed and compression ratio.
For more compression ratio (but far more slow speed), use lzma/xz.
bzip2 is out-dated. It occupies a bit more space than lzma/xz, but the decompression speed is much slower.
For fastest speed and lowest CPU usage, use lzop. On modern (500MHz+) computers, it most likely that your compression is bounded by your disk I/O! It’s very suitable for backing up a lot of large files.
