20 November 2006

XmlWiki backup system improved The Organic Design backups are created daily by Bender, compressed and distributed over SSH to various other domains. Today we've changed over from the classic gzip compression utility which uses the LZ77 algorithm to a much more modern utility called 7-Zip which uses the far more efficient LZMA algorithm. This change reduces our backup size to almost a third saving on space and bandwidth resource. This is the first step in a number of improvements we'd like to make to our backup system to counteract the ongoing decrease in communications reliability we've been experiencing over the last few months. The next step will be to adjust commands.pl to keep retrying connections until successful, and to allow continuation of partial transfers. We used a standalone linux binary from http://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip The windows version is available from www.7-zip.org and is a good free open-source replacement for winzip or winrar The first .t7z (.tar.7z) backup was created, transferred and decompressed succesffully in both Linux and Windows today Gzip backups were compressed to about 20.5% of the original size, the new 7-Zip backups are about 7.9%