> I am concerned about the longevity of my archives If you're concerned about archival longevity, and I for one certainly are, then maybe consider not to compr

> I am concerned about the longevity of my archives If you're concerned about archival longevity, and I for one certainly are, then maybe consider not to compress at all. Both compression and encryption add to obscurity and loss of redundancy in the backup. Using a widely understood file system and a very obvious arrangement of the data (for me that means: directories with dates, below a tree of files that mimics their original locations) will be a huge plus should the data have to be recovered at some point in the future. Personally I am using a slightly adapted version of https://github.com/cytopia/linux-timemachine https://github.com/cytopia/linux-timemachine for this task. You do get de-duplication for the file transfer, but each file is written as it was on the target. You'll get a timestamped directory for each time a backup was run. Like MacOS' timemachine, the script uses hard links to de-duplicate identical files across different timestamped directories so the overall space requirement for that incremental backup you did an hour or a day later can be very small. I can certify that this setup, while it does not occupy the least conceivable amount of storage area, is very amenable to be searched and trivial to use for recovery. much better in this regard than any kind of compressed archive format which are always a pain in terms of searchability and so on.