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Tape compression is probably not meant for your use cases, it's likely meant for large government institutions or corporations that generate petabytes of uncomp
by leptons 3y ago
Tape compression is probably not meant for your use cases, it's likely meant for large government institutions or corporations that generate petabytes of uncompressed text data a week - so instead of needing to manage compression as a separate process, the tape drive just does it without any other processing needed. The data can go from collection/creation to long-term storage without any other steps in between. For some organizations that's a big win. For the average home user backing up their plex, it might seem unnecessary.
- dylan604 3y agoLots of home users backing up their Plex with an LTO5 or greater are there?
- leptons 3y agoI am one of those home users with an LTO5, but I do not use tape compression and I have no illusions about what it was made for. I write tapes without any compression, because the stuff I write can't be compressed. Tape compression wasn't made for my use case, it was made for organizations that generate petabytes of text data.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThere's still a fair bit of mainframe-format data (zoned decimal, etc.) out there. These are typically in defined-data formats, a/k/a hierarchical , which is sort of a hybrid between data files and text files ("records" are lines, but often with multiple formats within a single file). These can achieve compression ratios ~= 90%. Standard written text typically runs about 50%. Compressed audio, image, and video data of course compress very little, if any.