Re: [gentoo-user] How to compress lots of tarballs

[Simon Thelen]

[2021-09-26 11:57] Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk>
> part       text/plain                 382
> Hello list,
Hi,

> I have an external USB-3 drive with various system backups. There are 350 .tar
> files (not .tar.gz etc.), amounting to 2.5TB. I was sure I wouldn't need to
> compress them, so I didn't, but now I think I'm going to have to. Is there a
> reasonably efficient way to do this? I have 500GB spare space on /dev/sda, and
> the machine runs constantly.
Pick your favorite of gzip, bzip2, xz or lzip (I recommend lzip) and
then:
mount USB-3 /mnt; cd /mnt; lzip *

The archiver you chose will compress the file and add the appropriate
extension all on its own and tar will use that (and the file magic) to
find the appropriate decompresser when you want to extract files later
(you can use `tar tf' to test if you want).

--
Simon Thelen