Topic: Compression level of Flex Backup

[Ruben]

I realized in the e-mail that flexbackup sends to the admin that a gzip compression is done to the dump before copying it to the tape drive. Does anybody know where the gzip is invoked in order to increase the compression parameter?

My backup does not fit into the tape just for a pair of megabytes.

regards,

Ruben

[SAVIN Jérome]

You can find it in /etc/flexbackup.conf  or related template.
Look for this lines :
$compress    = 'gzip';
$compr_level = '9';

Default is 4 you can set it to 9.

Bye.

Jérome / TSI Informatique

[Ruben]

Thanks a lot. Do you think whether it could be better to use another compressor like bz instead of gzip ?

regards,

Ruben

[Jérome]

Lets try with my home dir du -H say 700M :

configuration 1:
compress = gzip  compr_level =9
>flexbackup -fs /home/e-smith/files/users/jerome -d device=/tmp
...
...
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Fri Mar  7 10:35:43 2003
  DUMP: Date this dump completed:  Fri Mar  7 10:38:24 2003
>ls -l /tmp
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     475074560 mar  7 10:38 home-e-smith-files-users-jerome.0.20030307.dump.gz

configuration 2:
compress = bzip2  compr_level =9
>flexbackup -fs /home/e-smith/files/users/jerome -d device=/tmp
...
...
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Fri Mar  7 10:40:23 2003
  DUMP: Date this dump completed:  Fri Mar  7 10:49:28 2003
>ls -l /tmp
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     472535040 mar  7 10:49 home-e-smith-files-users-jerome.0.20030307.dump.bz2

So, no such difference in file sizes, but gzip takes less than 3 minutes, bzip2 takes 9 ! (x3!)

Bye.

Jérome / TSI Informatique www.tsi-info.com