I had this file structure:
2000/
001.txt
002.txt
003.txt
...
2001/
...
2002/
...
...
2011/
I guess file structure doesn't matter, but anyway...
So folders are representing couple of years with some text files inside.
Now I compress all, with Nautilus compress context menu (archive manager) in tar.gz
format. I choose this format as although it requires more space then bz2
, it's lot faster when I need to query data inside.
After this I create helper text file with references about archive contents (170 KB in size) and wanted to add it to archive, so I just drag & drop this file onto created archive in Nautilus.
Two bad things happen:
Droping file onto archive extracts whole archive in temp folder then re-compresses all files again! This is just awful for large archives, and I hope to find better way in Terminal later
Initial archive was ~ 96 MB in size, and now just by adding this 170 KB text file, archive become 140 MB! I checked inside it's same content + this tiny text file
Why is this?
I just created archive with contents from two subfolders, than drag&drop file with size of 100 bytes:
$ gzip -l tmp-original.tar.gz
compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name
13297512 69908480 81.0% tmp-original.tar
$ gzip -l tmp-updated.tar.gz
compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name
19231941 69908480 72.5% tmp-updated.tar