> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg A. Woods [mailto:woods@most.weird.com]
> Generally speaking data compression (and encryption) is something that
> really should always be applied to the archive _after_ it is created,
> not to the individual objects within an archive -- then at least a
> scanner can work in a streaming mode of operation.
The only problem with that scheme is if even one byte of the archive gets
corrupted, you lose all the files after that point. With individual file
compression, you can still recover the other files.
For emailing archives it doesn't matter, but this is a big issue for, say,
tape backups. This is why writing compressed tar archives to tape is a bad
idea -- if you have one tape dropout, or lose one tape in the set, the whole
thing becomes useless.
