Compressing unencrypted metafiles

[William Wolf]

This sound pretty good.  As someone who pretty much only uses
encrypted backups, I do think it would be nice to make it optional to
not need the extra dependency, but it isn't a hug deal either way I
guess.

On Monday, February 1, 2010, Gavin Carr <gavin at openfusion.com.au> wrote:
> On one of my backups - unencrypted, lots and lots of small files, over a
> high latency link - the storage of the metafile takes 20 minutes, which is
> up to 2/3 of the time of the whole backup. Gzipping the metafile reduces
> that to 3 minutes, and reduces the storage requirements on both the client
> and the server from 30M to 5M.
>
> Reasonably straightforward patch attached. This only compresses for
> unencrypted backups, since we already get compression for free with
> encrypted ones.
>
> We should also implement compression of chunks for unencrypted backups at
> some point. But this remains a useful halfway-house, I think, because for
> some kinds of backups - like images, or music - chunk compression isn't
> going to buy you much, but metafile compression still makes sense.
>
>
> Questions:
>
> - I've made this the default behaviour for unencrypted backups - is that
>   reasonable? Do we need a flag to be able to turn this off?
>
> - this adds another dependency, on IO::Compress. Is that ok? Should it be
>   optional, so people who only do encrypted ones don't need to worry about
>   it?
>
>
> Thoughts/comments?
>
> Cheers,
> Gavin
>
>
>

-- 

William Wolf